Guy Demmert got quite a surprise when he hauled a fishing net into his boat off the coast of southeast Alaska in July 2002. There among the salmon, in living black and white, was a Humboldt penguin, thousands of miles from where any of its kind should have been.
The flightless bird appeared to be healthy and in good condition, and Demmert snapped its picture before turning the bird loose.
It wasn't the first sighting of a penguin in Alaskan waters. In fact Demmert himself reported seeing one while fishing in 2001, and in 1976 a research cruise in the Gulf of Alaska recorded the sighting of "brown penguins."
So how is it that birds that swim rather than fly and live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere turned up deep into the Northern Hemisphere? Did they migrate more than 5,000 miles from Peru" That's doubtful, say two University of Washington biologists. Were they the remnants of efforts to introduce breeding penguin colonies into the Northern Hemisphere" Probably not. Did they escape from zoos" Not likely.
The most probable explanation is that the creatures were hauled aboard boats probably fishing boats -- in southern waters and were kept by the crews as the vessels traveled far to the north, then were released, concludes a new research paper by Dee Boersma, a UW biology professor noted for her penguin studies, and Amy Van Buren, a UW doctoral student in biology.
"The crews keep the penguins as pets on board the boat. They're appealing," said Van Buren. "People keep them around because they're so cute."
The Humboldt is one of 17 penguin species, and is sometimes referred to as the Peruvian penguin because it typically lives along the coasts of Peru and Chile. The Galapagos penguin is the only species that lives north of the equator, and that is only because Isabella Island, one of the Galapagos Islands where the species lives and breeds, lies partially north of the equator.