King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus): Facts and Habitat

What does a king penguin look like?

King penguins are among the most colorful penguins. The head and throat are black, and a bright orange, spoon-shaped patch sits on each side of the head behind the ear. Thin orange lines curve down from these patches to a golden-orange upper breast that fades into a white belly. The back is a silvery, slightly grizzled gray rather than pure black.

The bill is long, slim and slightly curved. Along each side of the lower half runs a colorful plate that ranges from pink to orange-yellow. Studies have shown that this bill spot reflects ultraviolet light, which penguins can see, and it may help birds judge the maturity or condition of a potential mate.

Males and females look the same, although males are slightly larger on average. Researchers usually tell the sexes apart by their calls or behavior during courtship. Young birds that have just shed their brown down resemble adults but have paler, yellower ear patches. The chicks themselves look completely different, as explained in why king penguin chicks are brown and fluffy.

How big is a king penguin?

The king penguin is second in size only to its close relative, the emperor penguin. Both belong to the genus Aptenodytes, the “great penguins”. A standing king penguin is roughly 25% shorter than an emperor and weighs about a third less.

Weight changes a great deal through the year. Birds are heaviest just before their annual molt, when large individuals can reach about 20 kg (44 lb), because they must store enough fat to survive several weeks ashore without food while they grow new feathers. Breeding adults also lose weight during long fasts on the egg. At Marion Island, one study measured average weights of about 12.4 kg (27 lb) for males and 11.1 kg (24 lb) for females.

Where do king penguins live?

King penguins breed on islands of the Southern Ocean between about 45° and 55° south, a band north of the Antarctic pack ice where the sea never freezes. The largest populations are on the Crozet Islands (around 455,000 pairs), the Kerguelen Islands (roughly 240,000–280,000 pairs), the Prince Edward Islands (about 228,000 pairs) and South Georgia (more than 100,000 pairs). Smaller colonies exist on Macquarie Island, Heard Island, the Falkland Islands and the Argentine part of Tierra del Fuego.

Colonies form on flat, ice-free beaches and glacial valleys close to the sea, because king penguins avoid climbing. Some are enormous: St Andrews Bay on South Georgia holds more than 150,000 breeding pairs, and Salisbury Plain more than 30,000 pairs. Because the breeding cycle lasts more than a year, colonies are occupied in every season.

Away from the colonies, king penguins spend weeks at sea. Their non-breeding range is not well known, but wandering birds have turned up on the Antarctic Peninsula and on the coasts of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Compare this range with other species in where penguins live.

What do king penguins eat?

King penguins are carnivores that specialize in small, oily lanternfish. These fish make up roughly 80% of the diet for most of the year, falling to about 30% in July and August, the southern winter, when squid become more important. Krill and other crustaceans are taken in smaller amounts.

Lanternfish rise toward the surface at night and sink deeper by day, and king penguins follow them. Daytime dives usually reach 100–300 m (330–980 ft), while night dives are mostly shallower than 30 m (98 ft). The deepest dive recorded for a king penguin is about 343 m (1,125 ft), and the longest lasted about 552 seconds, a little over nine minutes. Most of their dives are flat-bottomed: the bird descends, hunts at one depth for a while, then returns. More on this in how deep penguins can dive.

Many king penguins feed near the Antarctic Polar Front, a boundary where cold Antarctic water meets warmer sub-Antarctic water and food is concentrated. During summer, a parent may travel 300–500 km (190–310 mi) from its colony on a single foraging trip lasting a week or more. The usual swimming speed is about 6.5–10 km/h (4–6 mph), and birds often “porpoise”, leaping clear of the water to breathe without slowing down.

Behavior: life in a crowded colony

King penguins are highly social and noisy. They build no nest, so breeding birds defend only the small patch of ground where they stand, keeping a pecking distance from their neighbors. Positions within the colony stay remarkably stable for weeks, and the birds end up spaced in an almost regular pattern.

With thousands of identical birds in one place, sound is essential. Each king penguin has a distinctive call made with two sound sources in its voice box at once, and partners and chicks can pick out each other’s voices among the din. On land, king penguins walk with a rocking waddle or slide on their bellies, a movement called tobogganing. Like all penguins, they cannot fly; why penguins can’t fly explains what they gained instead.

Reproduction: a breeding cycle of more than a year

King penguins have one of the longest breeding cycles of any bird. From egg-laying to the day the chick goes to sea takes about 14–16 months, so a pair can at best raise two chicks every three years. In practice many pairs succeed only every other year.

Adults return to the colony between September and November to molt, go back to sea for about three weeks, and then come ashore again in November or December to court. Pairs stay faithful during a season, but fewer than 30% reunite the following year, partly because the long cycle puts former partners out of step. Most birds breed for the first time at about five or six years old.

The female lays a single pear-shaped, white egg weighing about 300 g (11 oz). The parents take turns to incubate it on their feet, under a fold of belly skin called the brood pouch, in shifts of about 6–18 days, while the off-duty partner feeds at sea. Incubation lasts around 55 days.

After hatching, the chick stays on a parent’s feet for about 30–40 days. It then joins a crèche, a group of chicks watched by a few adults, while both parents fish. By April the chick is almost adult-sized, but winter brings long gaps between meals and it loses weight. Feeding picks up again in spring, and the young bird molts into juvenile plumage and heads to sea in late spring or early summer, at roughly 10–13 months old.

Lifespan, predators and threats

King penguins are long-lived seabirds with high adult survival, but their exact lifespan in the wild is poorly measured. Most estimates suggest 15–20 years or more, and captive birds have lived at least 26 years. Learn how this compares with other species in how long penguins live.

At sea, adults and newly independent young are hunted by leopard seals and orcas. On land, giant petrels kill many chicks and occasionally weak adults, while skuas, kelp gulls and snowy sheathbills take eggs and small or dead chicks. On Marion Island, Antarctic fur seals have been seen chasing and killing king penguins on the beach.

The long-term threat is climate change. If the Antarctic Polar Front shifts south as the ocean warms, parents will have to swim much farther to feed their chicks. One modeling study suggested that a large share of today’s colonies could become unsuitable by 2100 if emissions keep rising. Commercial fishing for lanternfish has also been proposed near South Georgia, which could compete with penguins for food.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classifies the king penguin as Least Concern, last assessed in 2020. The world population is estimated at about 2.2 million breeding pairs and is increasing overall, mainly because colonies have recovered since commercial exploitation ended.

That recovery followed a dark chapter. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, sealers and whalers on South Georgia and the Falklands killed huge numbers of king penguins for oil and, on treeless islands, even burned the oily birds as fuel. By the early 1920s these populations were close to being wiped out. Today the species is fully protected on all its breeding islands.

Not every colony is thriving. The colony on Île aux Cochons in the Crozet Islands, once among the largest in the world, fell from about 500,000 breeding pairs in the 1980s to around 60,000 by 2017, according to aerial and satellite images. The cause is still being studied, with changes in the food supply among the leading explanations.

Myths and facts

Myth: King penguins live in Antarctica. Fact: they breed on sub-Antarctic islands north of the pack ice and only rarely wander to the Antarctic Peninsula.

Myth: Brown fluffy penguins are a separate species. Fact: the brown birds seen in king penguin colonies are chicks in their thick first down.

Myth: King penguins are just smaller emperors. Fact: the two species differ in breeding sites, timing and chick plumage. Emperors raise their chicks in a single Antarctic winter and spring, while king chicks take more than a year.

King penguins and people

King penguins are one of the most visited penguins on Earth, because the colonies of South Georgia and the Falklands lie on the routes of expedition cruise ships. Visitors are asked to stay at least several meters from the birds and never to block their paths to the sea.

They are also popular in zoos and aquariums in Europe, North America and Asia. The most famous individual is Sir Nils Olav, a king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland who serves as the mascot of the Norwegian King’s Guard and has been promoted through the ranks over several decades, the title passing from one penguin to the next. In 1936 a few king penguins were even released in northern Norway in a failed attempt to establish a colony; none have been recorded there since 1949.