A wonderful day at the Antipodes Islands in good weather. A chance to photograph two new species (for us) of penguins.
Erect-crested penguins breed only on the remote and infrequently visited Antipodes and Bounty islands. As the name implies, their most obvious defining characteristic is their pair of erect yellow crest feathers; quite different from the other crested penguin species.
Rockhopper penguins were traditionally classified as a single species but were split into three distinct subspecies in 1992; the southern, (E. c. chrysocome), eastern (E. c. filholi) and northern rockhopper penguin (E. c. moseleyi). The three subspecies are distinguished by differences in the length of the tassels of the crests, the size and colour of the fleshy margin of the gape, colour pattern on the underside of the flipper and differences in the size of the superciliary stripe in front of the eye. Proof that the three subspecies were truly different, in terms of more than reproductive isolation and some morphological features, was found in the mitochondrial sequences of the three species.
There is little difference in appearance between these three subspecies,
but they are found in widely separated locations. Those on the Antipodes Islands are eastern rockhoppers. We had previously seen southern rockhoppers on the Falkland Islands. To see northern rockhoppers we would need to voyage to the even more remote Gough Island and Tristan da Cunha in the southern Indian Ocean.
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