King Penguin — facts, diet, habitat & conservation

The king penguin is the emperor penguin’s slightly smaller cousin — nearly a metre tall, boldly marked in silver, black, and orange, and gathered in colonies so large they can be seen from space. Its most remarkable trait is time: it takes a king penguin more than a year to raise a single chick.

Overview

King penguins breed on the beaches and tussock slopes of the sub-Antarctic islands scattered around the Southern Ocean — most numerously on South Georgia and the French islands of Crozet and Kerguelen. They come ashore only to breed and moult, spending the rest of their lives at sea, and their colonies are vast, densely packed, and permanently occupied because there are always birds at some stage of the long breeding cycle.

Physical characteristics

A king penguin stands about 90 cm and weighs 9–18 kg depending on how recently it has fed. The back is blue-grey, the belly white, and the head black with a comma-shaped patch of vivid orange behind each eye that fades to a paler orange-yellow bib on the upper chest. The bill is long and slender, with an orange or pink plate along the lower half.

Like all penguins, its wings are stiff flippers for “flying” underwater, its bones are solid to reduce buoyancy, and a dense layer of overlapping feathers over fat keeps it warm in near-freezing seas.

Feeding

King penguins are pursuit divers that hunt in the mid-water column, mainly for lanternfish and small squid. Foraging dives typically reach 100–300 m and last several minutes, and a bird provisioning a chick may travel hundreds of kilometres to the productive ocean front where its prey concentrates, then return to regurgitate the meal.

The breeding marathon

The cycle is what sets the king penguin apart:

Courtship on the colony, with elaborate mutual displays and trumpeting calls.
A single egg, laid in November–December (or as late as March), carried on the parents’ feet under a warm brood patch — there is no nest. The pair alternate incubation shifts of one to three weeks for about 54 days.
Chick-rearing, which runs through the sub-Antarctic autumn and winter. As food becomes scarce the parents can only visit occasionally, so the fat, brown-downed chick fasts for weeks at a time, huddling with other chicks in crèches, and may lose half its body weight before spring.
The chick fledges at 10–13 months.

Because this takes so long, a pair that raises a chick early one year will breed late the next, and skip the year after — a “two chicks in three years” rhythm.

Threats and conservation

The king penguin is Least Concern overall, and numbers rebounded strongly after the sealing and oiling of the 19th and early 20th centuries ended. But the outlook is uncertain. Warming is shifting the Antarctic Polar Front — the band of upwelling ocean where king penguins feed — poleward, lengthening the round trip from some colonies to the point where parents may not be able to feed a chick fast enough. Some large colonies, notably on Île aux Cochons in the Crozet group, have already crashed by unexplained amounts. Introduced cats, rats, and pigs threaten colonies on a few islands.

King Penguin: common questions

What is the difference between a king penguin and an emperor penguin?

The emperor is bigger, breeds on Antarctic sea ice through the polar winter, and the male alone incubates the egg. The king is smaller, breeds on sub-Antarctic island beaches, and both parents share incubation. King penguins have brighter, more orange ear patches and a longer, more curved bill.

Why does it take king penguins over a year to raise one chick?

The chick grows slowly and must be fed through the sub-Antarctic winter, when food is scarce and the parents can only make occasional foraging trips. The whole cycle — courtship, a 54-day incubation, and roughly a year of chick-rearing — runs 14 to 16 months, so a pair cannot successfully breed every year. Most raise two chicks every three years.

Why do king penguin chicks look so different from the adults?

Chicks are covered in thick brown down that makes them look like fat, woolly, entirely different birds — early explorers described them as a separate species, the "woolly penguin." The dense down insulates them through the winter fast. They moult into waterproof adult feathers and go to sea at about a year old.

Are king penguins endangered?

The species is listed as Least Concern and the global population has grown over the last century as historical exploitation stopped. But several major colonies are now declining, and climate projections are worrying — warming is pushing the ocean front where king penguins feed further from their island colonies.