I stumbled into an online argument about it. Some were saying no, some were saying yes. The ‘yes’ camp were saying there were some living on the Galapagos Islands and some of the islands extend north of the equator - but stopped short of claiming that penguins live on those islands.
Googling a bit kind of reinforced that. So, do any penguins actually live in the northern hemisphere?
The Wikipedia article on the Galapagos penguin says this:
Despite the first statement, the two specific islands which are then mentioned both appear to lie south of the Equator.
(And, yeah, Wikipedia is crowdsourced, so that first statement should be treated with a grain of salt, unless it’s linked to a solid cite.)
Loads of them in Zoos and Aquariums. Very popular exhibit animals.
But the Galapagos Penguins probably do count if just barely.
Why Are There No Penguins In The North Pole? | Penguins International.
There is one African Penguin (Spheniscus demursus ) and 3 species that inhabit the Americas with the Galapagos Penguins (Sphendiscus mendiculus ) living just slightly in the Northern Hemisphere, living so close to the equator.
For some trivia, there was a “penguin” living in the North, but it went extinct in about the 1850’s, due to 1. The Little Ice age, 2. Their breeding island blowing up due to volcanic activity and 3- Hunting by man. This was the Great Auk, Pinguinus impennis, which was the original “penguin” .
It looked quite a bit like a southern Penguin, but was not closely related.
Nevermind.
This reminds me of the bugs bunny cartoon where he tries to return a penguin home.
“Hoboken???!”
Curiously, finding a detailed map with those islands on it and an equator line is challenging (well, for me and my google-fu challenged self). The ones I did find seemed show Fernandina Island south of that line but they didn’t appear to be ultra-precise.
The penguins I saw in Galapagos were south of the Equator. Whether there are a few individusls or a colony north of the Equator I don’t know, but I’d think my Galapagos-native tour guide would have mentioned it as a marvelous fact.
“Ohhhh, I’m dyin’, again!”
“Do any penguins live in the northern hemisphere?”
Not since the polar bears finished them off.
On the face of it, that cartoon makes no sense…
Who ever heard of a penguin named Edgar?
Well, if it came from the zoo, it’d have Property of the Zoo stamped on it!
It looks like Fernandina Island at best doesn’t get closer than 15.7 minutes south of the equator. Isabela Island is in both hemispheres. Go onto google maps and look at Isabela Island. The eye of the seahorse is a hair north of the equator.
Chilly Willie
Is there a sub-text to this cartoon I just now got? Like, they’re really at the South Pole and Mr. Polar Bear somehow scrounged up enough cash for plane fare?
There’s not really any funny subtext to it, other than this:
In the collection The Prehistory of the Far Side, Larson admitted that it was only after that comic was published, and he got a number of letters from biologists and readers, that he realized that penguins and polar bears don’t live in the same place.
Yeah, that sounds like him.
I find this revelation funny as hell. I always had assumed that the polar bear/penguin impossibility intentionally put an extra dose of absurdity to an already absurd joke.
The northernmost point of Isabela Island is about 18km north of the Equator. Maps of the Galapagos Penguin’s range show it occupying the entire west coast of this island, to the northern tip.