Save the Penguins!

[rangerrebew]

Save the Penguins!
 
Kip Hansen
 
News Brief by Kip Hansen – 4 August 2021

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (US FWS) apparently thinks federal policy should be based in single, speculative studies that claim to predict the future.  In this case, Martha Williams, principal deputy director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement:

 “The decisions made by policymakers today and during the next few decades will determine the fate of the emperor penguin.” During an announcement that US FWS was proposing listing the Emperor Penguin under the protections of the Endangered Species Act.

Catrin Einhorn, a journalist for the The New York Times says, erroneously, that “The penguins live much of the year on Antarctic sea ice, which is disappearing or breaking apart because of the heat-trapping gases released by humans’ use of fossil fuels. The penguins need the ice to breed, raise their young and escape predators.”

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/04/save-the-penguins/

[rangerrebew]

It seems to me if "global warming" isn't harming polar bears, it follows it isn't harming penguins, either.

[catfish1957]

Probably taste like Chicken.  Only a little fattier.

[GtHawk]

Why can't they just get the damn thermostat set right! In February it was all about the Antarctic sea ice expansion

http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/changing-antarctica/antarctic-sea-ice/

[240B]

Probably taste like Chicken.  Only a little fattier.

@catfish1957


An Emperor penguin being skinned on board the Endurance.

Hearty Penguin Steaks: the Old-School Explorers' Salve for Scurvy


Imagine you’re in Antarctica. It’s cold. You’re cold. Your joints ache, old wounds are reopening to ooze pus, and your teeth loosen, threatening to fall out one or two at a time. What do you feel like eating? How about “a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce?”

If this sounds delicious, then your stomach serves you well. That’s how famous polar explorer Frederick Cook described the taste of penguin meat, and that is how you cure yourself of scurvy in Antarctica when fresh vegetables are nowhere to be found. Fresh meat—lightly cooked or raw—contains vitamin C, whose deficiency causes scurvy and the delightful symptoms described above.

Unfortunately for turn-of-the-century Antarctic explorers, most expedition leaders were not as enlightened as Cook and many a man succumbed to scurvy. Unfortunately for Antarctica’s penguins, they were also easy prey for the men who did eat them. “Long lines of curious penguins marched across the ice and right into camp, which almost always meant death as dog food, human food, or fuel for the boiler. A stew of penguin heart and liver became a crew favorite,” describes Jason C. Anthony in a paper on Antarctic cuisine in the Heroic Age in Endeavour.

(more)
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/hearty-penguin-steaks-the-old-school-explorers-salve-for-scurvy

Penguins are unusually loaded with an extreme amount of various vitamins, primarily because of their exclusively seafood diet. So much vitamin A and D that with eating too much penguin a human could overdose on it. But yes, it used to be common to eat penguins while exploring near Antarctica.