42 EDWARD A. WILSON. 
course of events, when feeding or when travelling, it is doubtful whether a longer 
submersion could be borne with comfort. All that can be seen by watching the 
bird in the water is that its submersion is of very short duration when travelling 
rapidly in a straight line. It will leave the water for breath by a leap in the 
air at intervals which vary from 20 to 50 yards or more; it would be no rare feat 
to pass under an icefloe of 100 yards, and in doing so the sense of direction is 
well maintained beneath the ice, as one may see, if the bird is endeavouring to reach 
a companion some little distance away. 
The food of the Adélie Penguin during the summer months consists almost 
entirely of Huphausia superba, a red shrimp-like schizopodous crustacean, which exists 
in vast numbers in the shallow seas of the Antarctic. These red crustaceans can be 
seen sometimes in large numbers in the water, frequenting chiefly the ice pack, the 
edges of the icefloes, or the foot of the ice cliffs which form the sea faces of the 
Barrier snow plains. Here, therefore—in the early hours of the morning, more 
abundantly than at any other time, but at every other hour in the twenty-four as 
well—may be seen hundreds of penguins feeding, their black heads and loud voices 
proclaiming their business, while they swiftly dash in and out of the water in small 
companies, like a school of little dolphins. 
In its passage through the alimentary track the colouring matter of this 
crustacean is apparently little altered, so that the ground which is occupied by an 
Adélie Penguin rookery takes on a brick-red colour from the excrement, and 
this can be recognised by sight, even at a very considerable distance from the shore. 
Not only does the general colour of the ground give evidence from afar of the situation 
of a rookery of Adélie Penguins, but the smell has in more than one case directed us 
to search for and discover a hitherto unsuspected colony. The smell is unpleasantly 
fishy and ammoniacal. After a landing from the ship, our clothes and boots, notwith- 
standing a vigorous cleansing, kept us in constant recollection of the rookery by 
impregnating our cabins with the smell for days. It is quite unlike the smell of 
anything else, and to one who has spent a day or two in their midst, though he were 
blindfold, the smell of the museum skin of a penguin chicken would at once recall the 
harsh and noisy clamour of some crowded rookery of Adélie Penguins in the south. 
On one occasion this smell was forced upon our notice when we were no less than 
30 miles from the nearest penguin rookery. Travelling at the time with sledges on 
the Barrier surface to the south of Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, we were thinking 
of anything in the world but penguins, when a gentle breeze sprang up across the 
divide between these two mountains, blowing in a bee-line to us from the great 
rookery at Cape Crozier, 30 miles away. The smell was faint but unmistakable, and 
the truth of our perceptions was borne out a little later, when we found some 
weathered penguins’ feathers that had been carried in the same way over the divide, 
itself a height of from 6,000 to 7,000 feet. We were, moreover, at the time making 
observations on the quantity of ozone in the air, and in passing into the current which 
