Life

Love is Dead: Not All Penguins Mate for Life

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Junko Kimura/Getty Images

We’ve long held this romanticized view of penguins in our hearts and minds. After all, they mate for life!

Penguins pick a partner and stick with them until the end of their days. If only we were also lucky. Well, sorry to break it to you, but for at least one species, that isn’t true at all. They actually get divorced more often than we do.

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The Little Penguin, aka Eudyptula minor, was found to have a divorce rate of up to 50 percent, which is significantly higher than the US human divorce rate which currently stands at 2.4 divorces per thousand marriages annually.

Sad But True: Not All Penguins Mate for Life

Don’t lose heart, though. There are still plenty of penguin species that are considered monogamous, but researchers from Monash University in Australia, who have been studying Little Penguins for several years, found that between the years 2000 and 2000 over 21 Little Penguin breakups were observed. In total, over 12 breeding seasons, the scientists counted almost 250 “divorces” as a part of a cohort of almost 1,000 paired penguins.

The definition of a “divorce” when it comes to penguins, according to the researchers, is when a tagged penguin from the previous year’s breeding season returns to the colony with a new mate. Poor breeding seasons often prompted some to seek a new partner to increase their chances of offspring survival. They’re a lot like humans, where reproductive success plays a key role in whether or not couples stay together.

Divorce isn’t unique to the Little Penguin. Emperor and Adélie penguins also seek new mates if things aren’t looking too good with their current ones. Only 15 percent of Emperor penguins stay with the same mate year after year.

The whole “penguins mate for life” thing was a cute idea that was fun while it lasted, but it was inevitable that the scientific community would catch up to it eventually to drag the romanticized fantasy back down to reality.