Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri): Facts and Habitat

What does an emperor penguin look like?

An adult emperor penguin has a glossy blue-black head, chin, throat and back, sharply separated from a white belly. The upper breast is washed with pale yellow, and a bright yellow to orange patch curves behind each ear. The long, slightly curved bill is black above, with a pink, orange or lilac stripe along the lower half.

Males and females look almost identical, so researchers usually tell them apart by their calls or behavior. Chicks are very different: they are covered in silvery-gray down with a black head and a striking white mask around the eyes. Young birds that have just left the colony look like smaller, duller adults with whitish chins and paler ear patches.

The emperor’s closest relative is the king penguin, the second-largest species. The two share the genus Aptenodytes, whose name comes from Greek words meaning “wingless diver”. Emperors are taller and much heavier, with paler, less sharply defined yellow ear patches, and they live farther south.

How big is an emperor penguin?

The emperor is the tallest and heaviest of the 18 or so living penguin species. Measured from bill tip to tail tip, adults are about 1.1–1.3 m (3.6–4.3 ft) long. Standing height is lower, usually around 0.9–1.1 m (3–3.6 ft), because a standing penguin bends its neck and rests on its short legs. Figures of 1.2 m (3.9 ft) or more quoted in popular sources usually come from length, not height. For the details, see how tall an emperor penguin is.

Weight changes dramatically through the year. A male arriving at the colony fat and well fed may weigh close to 40 kg (88 lb), but after up to four months of courtship and incubation without food he can lose a third or more of that mass. Males are usually a little heavier than females at the same point in the season.

Where do emperor penguins live?

Emperor penguins live only in Antarctica and the cold Southern Ocean around it. Their breeding colonies are scattered right around the continent, mostly between latitudes 66° and 77° south. The most northerly colony is at Snow Hill Island, near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Wandering young birds very occasionally turn up farther north, including one that reached New Zealand in 2011 and one in southwestern Australia in 2024.

Unlike most penguins, emperors do not nest on land. They breed on fast ice, which is sea ice “fastened” to the coastline, to ice shelves or to grounded icebergs. Ice cliffs and icebergs shelter many colonies from the wind. In some years, when the sea ice forms late, a few colonies move up onto the floating ice shelves instead.

Because many colonies are remote and visited in the dark winter, scientists found most of them using satellite images. Colonies stain the ice brown with guano, which shows up clearly from space. Satellite surveys have raised the number of known breeding sites from 46 in 2009 to more than 60. The global population is estimated at roughly a quarter of a million breeding pairs.

What do emperor penguins eat?

Emperor penguins are carnivores that catch all their food at sea. Fish usually make up most of the diet, especially the Antarctic silverfish, a small schooling fish. They also take other cod icefishes (notothens), squid such as the glacial squid, and Antarctic krill. The exact mix varies between colonies and seasons.

Emperors hunt by sight, often in loose groups. One documented strategy is to dive to around 50 m (160 ft), look up, and pick off fish swimming against the underside of the sea ice. Backward-pointing spines on the tongue help them hold slippery prey, which is swallowed whole.

Foraging trips can be long. Adults feeding chicks may travel hundreds of kilometers from the colony, and after the winter fast, males head straight for polynyas, areas of open water within the ice where food is easier to reach.

How deep can emperor penguins dive?

The emperor penguin is the deepest-diving bird known. Most foraging dives are much shallower than its limit, but tagged birds have reached 564 m (1,850 ft), and the longest dives recorded have lasted more than 20 minutes. Several adaptations make this possible: solid rather than air-filled bones, hemoglobin that keeps working at very low oxygen levels, and a heart rate that can fall to about 15–20 beats per minute while non-essential organs are temporarily starved of blood.

On land, emperors walk with a slow, rocking waddle or slide on their bellies, pushing with their feet and flippers. This “tobogganing” saves energy on long journeys across the ice. In the water they usually cruise at 6–9 km/h (4–6 mph).

Behavior: huddles and life in the colony

Emperor penguins are highly social. During the winter storms, when air temperatures can fall below −40 °C (−40 °F) and winds exceed 100 km/h (60 mph), the incubating males crowd together in tight huddles that can contain hundreds or thousands of birds. Individuals on the windward edge slowly shuffle along the sides to the sheltered back, so that every bird takes turns on the outside and in the warm center. Read more about how emperor penguins survive the cold.

Because they have no fixed nest, emperors recognize their mates and chicks by voice alone. Each bird has a distinctive call that uses two frequency bands at once, which helps it stand out among thousands of others. Emperors are not strongly territorial, which is why they can tolerate the close contact needed for huddling.

Reproduction and life cycle

The breeding cycle starts in March or April, at the beginning of the Antarctic winter, when adults walk 50–120 km (31–75 mi) across the sea ice to their colony. Pairs form after loud courtship calls and mirrored bowing displays. They are faithful for one season, but most pick a new mate the following year.

In May or early June, the female lays a single egg weighing about 450–470 g (16–17 oz). She passes it carefully to the male, then walks back to the sea to feed. The male balances the egg on his feet under a warm fold of skin called the brood pouch and incubates it for about 65–75 days without eating. By the time the chick hatches, he may have fasted for around 115–120 days in total. This remarkable shift is described in detail in how emperor penguins keep their eggs warm.

If the chick hatches before the female returns, the father can feed it a protein-rich secretion from his esophagus for a few days. The mother returns in July or August, finds her family by its call, and takes over, feeding the chick with regurgitated fish, squid and krill. The parents then take turns at sea. At about 45–50 days old, chicks gather in groups called crèches. They molt into juvenile plumage and leave for the sea in December or January, at about five months old.

Emperors can breed at about three years old but usually start a year or more later. Chick mortality is high: in studied colonies only around one in five chicks survives its first year.

Lifespan, predators and threats

Emperor penguins typically live about 15–20 years in the wild. Adult survival is high, at around 95% per year in one long-term study, and researchers estimate that a small fraction of birds may reach 40–50 years.

At sea, adults and newly fledged young are hunted by leopard seals and orcas. On the ice, southern giant petrels kill many chicks in some colonies, and south polar skuas mostly scavenge dead ones. Adults on the sea ice have no land predators.

The main long-term threat is climate change. Emperor penguins need fast ice that stays stable from April until chicks grow waterproof feathers in December or January. When the ice breaks up too early, chicks can drown or freeze. Antarctic sea ice reached record lows from 2016 onward, and several colonies have suffered complete breeding failures, including Halley Bay from 2016 to 2018 and four colonies in the Bellingshausen Sea region in 2022.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List moved the emperor penguin from Near Threatened to Endangered in April 2026. The assessment found that the population fell by about 10% between 2009 and 2018, more than 20,000 adults, and is projected to halve by the 2080s unless greenhouse gas emissions fall sharply. In the United States the species has been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 2022.

Emperor penguins are protected under the Antarctic Treaty System, and scientists monitor colonies by satellite every year. Their main hope, however, lies in limiting global warming. Find out more in are emperor penguins endangered?

Myths and facts

Myth: Emperor penguins mate for life. Fact: they are faithful within a breeding season, but most choose a new partner each year.

Myth: Emperor penguins can stand 1.5 m (5 ft) tall. Fact: large figures usually confuse body length with height; standing emperors are typically about 1 m (3.3 ft) tall, roughly waist to chest height on an adult person.

Myth: All penguins live in Antarctica. Fact: emperors and Adélie penguins are the true Antarctic specialists, while many other penguins breed in South America, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and even the Galápagos Islands.

Emperor penguins and people

Very few people have seen emperor penguins in the wild, and most colonies are reached only by scientists or specialist expeditions. The species became famous through the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins and the animated film Happy Feet (2006), and it appears on the stamps of many countries. Explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of a winter journey to the Cape Crozier colony in 1911, The Worst Journey in the World (1922), remains a classic of polar writing.

A few aquariums in North America and Asia keep and breed emperor penguins in chilled enclosures. In the wild, visitors are asked to keep their distance, because noise and aircraft can disturb breeding birds. Emperor penguins appear alongside seals, whales and seabirds in our guide to Antarctic animals.