Males dive deeper, but female Magellanic penguins swim further for food and get stranded as far away as the Brazilian coast, according to new research.
It seems that the males are larger, heavier, and stronger so can dive deeper for forward, the females have to migrate further to sate their appetites, travelling further from mating grounds simply means more exposure to risks on the outward and inward journeys. Science wasn’t aware of this sexual dimorphism in behaviour until this latest tracking experiment. It seems that it’s the juvenile females that get stranded more frequently than the adults.
Weather and human activity are mentioned as risk factors in the research paper itself.