Scholars Notebook Entry: Penguins are Natures Best Snugglers

07 October 2020 “Penguins are Natures Best Snugglers”

a. Read “Penguins Are Nature’s Best Snugglers,” listing any “must haves” as you read:
key ideas, arguments, and counterarguments you think must appear in your summary.

Big Ideas/ Arguments:

- Equitable heat distribution for the entire community
- Penguins will execute their huddles with high degree of mathematical efficiency
- Development and installation of high-resolution cameras to observe undisturbed
huddling behavioral.
- Teams model revealed that birds don’t move in unison
- Birds arrange themselves as if they were standing on their own hexagon in a grid
- first penguin—typically the coldest on the windward side—to relocate. This penguin,
known as the mover,
- All that matters is that he finds the penguin with the least heat loss
- “How is the penguin feeling? …And we measure behavior” - Zitterbart
- Huddles are dependent on many factors.
- −44.5 degrees Fahrenheit as the tipping point at which penguins will have a 50 percent
chance of huddling—meaning at that temperature, the birds are expected to transition
from a loose configuration to a dense huddle.
- temperature at which they transition into a huddle serves as an indirect measure of the
penguins’ average fat content and energy reserves.
- if the penguins start huddling at higher-than-expected apparent temperatures, it could
mean that an altered food supply or climate change has hurt their foraging success.

b. Write a sentence stating the author’s main purpose or idea. It might help to ask
yourself, “Of what is the author attempting to convince or inform me?”

Zitterbart and his team have discovered that when penguins huddle together, they arrange
themselves in the most thermal efficient model possible.

Team Summary:
“Penguin huddles efficiently distribute heat and provide an effective way for penguins to
survive. Huddles coincide with biological patterns (variation in diet, climate, behaviors, etc.)”
-WAKS, 2020