Penguins and jellyfish commonly inhabit the same Antarctic waters, but until recently it was believed they didn’t have much to do with one another.
All that changed when a team of international researchers led by Jean-Baptiste Thiebot of the National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo attached video cameras to some patient penguins and sent them off swimming. As it turns out, penguins love a gelatinous snack.
In examining 350 hours of footage collected from cameras on 106 penguins of four different species (Adelie penguins, yellow-eyed penguins, Magellanic penguins, and little penguins), the researchers counted almost 200 attacks on jellyfish and other gelatinous sea creatures.
The results were published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Originally published by Cosmos as The penguin and the jellyfish
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