Post #14174

Why did the penguin go to the mountains? Review of the sensational video Look at this penguin, wandering last along with his relatives. Here he stops, looks at his brothers and sisters, as if saying goodbye to them. And then he chooses his own path, the path of a being who has risen above the crowd and is ready to risk a secure future in order to choose his own path. It commands respect, doesn't it? It was with this narrative that I first saw this video. Naturally, the biologist inside me not only rebelled - he became white-hot, got his hands on the body’s control panels and went to look for the original. And I found it, although it was not so easy. It turned out to be a Discovery documentary from 2007 called “Encounters at the End of the World.” The film is dedicated to the life and work of polar explorers - as well as the life of the animals they observe. It is there, towards the end of the film, that viral footage of a penguin appears, which goes to the mountains located 70 kilometers away. And the presenter of the documentary asks the question: what motivates the penguin, which with grim dignity goes into the mountains? And to our greatest regret, there is a short and tragic answer to this question: the penguin is disoriented. All the settings of his internal compass have been knocked down, and now he is only able to go in a random direction in pursuit of phantom targets. The cause of a fatal error in navigation can be different: head injury, tumor, illness, or simple old age. But the result is the same - the penguin goes to a place where it cannot survive. And even if you return him to the colony, the bird will again take a non-existent path leading to nowhere. The end of this path is known in advance. In regions of Antarctica remote from the ocean, even lichens do not grow everywhere, and the surface resembles a Martian wasteland. Even a man with his technology cannot survive there, let alone a penguin. And, unfortunately, the penguin caught in the video is far from the first who decided to go nowhere. Researchers come across such crazy wanderers every year when the nesting and mating season begins. They are living proof of the cruelty of the world around us, in which not all stories end well. Author: Yaroslav Ilyin 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot