Fear and Herd Behavior

One of my editors, Fen Montaigne of Yale Environment 360 has a new book out about Adelie penguins.  It's worth taking a look.

It also reminds me of a brief item I wrote about these penguins in my 2005 book The Ape in the Corner Office:

Fear of predators is one reason so many species practice herd behavior with such blind, fretful enthusiasm.

During a visit in the Antarctic, for instance, Peter Brueggeman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography sat in the middle of an Adelie penguin traffic jam watching the birds dither at water's edge.

"So what does it take for them to jump in?"  Brueggeman wondered, in his online journal.  "They watch the water and when a large group of penguins comes swimming into their immediate area, the Adelie penguins start getting very vocal." They jostle, jockey for position, squabble, peck back and forth, bash one another with their flippers, and engage in raucous discussion, followed by "an immediate chain reaction of everyone rushing to jump in the pool all at the same time, no waiting …"

So is all this commotion just the usual mindless negativity, bickering, and herd behavior all too familiar in other two-legged species?

In fact, it is a question of life or death.  Hungry leopard seals and orca whales patrol these shorelines in search of penguins for dinner.  But penguins need to eat, too, and sooner or later, if they can muster the positivity offset, that means going into the water.   If there are already lots of penguins in the water, chances are that the coast is clear.  So the dithering crowd on shore all try to do the same thing, jumping in at the exact same moment.  Some of them may still get eaten.  But this is the reward for social conformity:

Chances are, it'll happen to the other guy.