A penguin’s feathers serve as a form of camouflage called countershading. Countershading helps penguins blend in with their surroundings and hide from predators and prey. A penguin’s white belly serves as camouflage from underwater predators looking up, and its black back serves as camouflage for predators looking down.
It might stretch your imagination to think of a penguin being camouflaged in open water, however, marine habitats are the best at providing optimal lighting for a countershaded animal to blend in. When an animal is in the water, the light source is always directly overhead, making lighter colored objects closer to the surface harder to distinguish.
The distinct black and white coloring of penguins is a type of camouflage called countershading, which helps penguins hide from predators and hunt prey.
How do Penguins hear?
In the penguins, there is merely a separate hearing ossicle in the middle ear that is known as columella. The sound arrives from the central ear towards the cochlea inside the internal ear. In this part, the different occurrences of the voice evaluated, and after this evaluation, the info communicated towards the brain.
Why do penguins have feathers on their backs?
Penguins — all 17 or more kinds — grow feathers for warmth and for camouflage. Most penguins have dark, even black backs, so that when viewed underwater from above, they blend into the benthos. As well, most penguins have white chests, for the same reason: when viewed from below while underwater, they blend into the light.
Do penguins have ears?
The Penguins do have ears which situated over both the sides of the head. However, they don’t have outside ear pads, but that does not act as an obstruction in their path of hearing. To know more about the penguins, their ears and the hearing ability read the below informative article.
, and penguin ears. When looking at a penguin, you will not be able to see its ears . That’s because they have no external ears like humans do. Penguins hear through two small holes that are located at about the same place as a human’s ears. The holes are covered with feathers.
The ear itself is located in the lower back part of the skull. In order to visualize the ear, for the first time ever, we made CT scans of the skulls of the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) and Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) from the ornithological collection of the Museum of Natural History.
Another common question is “Why do penguins have holes in their ears?”.
The ears of the penguins are very simple holes that are covered by the feathers, and that is the reason you can’t see them easily with your eyes. The lack of exterior ear pads provides the penguins an extra streamline outline and reduces their struggle while doing the swimming inside the water.