New footage reveals that penguins are calculating mass killers.
Researchers strapped one-ounce cameras to the backs of 11 Adélie penguins off the coast of Antarctica and over the course of 88 minutes the birds devoured 244 krill and 33 fish without missing a single target.
“Our movies showed that the foraging behavior of Adélie penguins is remarkably fast and efficient,” researchers wrote in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.
Before conducting their research, scientists Yuuki Watanabe and Akinori Takahashi of the National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo examined the stomach contents of penguins to figure out what the birds ate.
But the scientists had no idea how ruthless the penguins would be as they snapped up tiny fish and darted through schools of krill.
One penguin in particular shocked the researchers when it swam through a group of krill and snatched up two of the tiny shrimp in under a second.
In another astonishing scene, one of the penguins swam up behind an unsuspecting fish as it swam near the ice and gobbled it down before the prey could even react.
“Escape behavior of the fish was not evident in most cases, suggesting an excellent stealth approach by penguins,” the scientist wrote.
The researchers also learned that, instead of constantly diving under the ice, the penguins instead only dove sporadically: shallow dives for fish and deeper dives to catch their favored meal of krill.
“Now we know what the Adélie penguin preys on and how much it eats, we can understand how the penguin survives and how it relates to its environment,” researchers said.