Illustration: Caroline Villard
EVERY GENERATION HAS ITS ROMANTIC MYTHS. OURS IS ABOUT PENGUINS. You will have heard it if you have watched enough romance-based reality TV.
Penguins mate for life, the story goes. At the beginning of the courtship, the male penguin seeks out a perfect rock on a frigid Antarctic beach. He carries it painstakingly in his mouth, and presents it to the female who has captured his heart. If she accepts it, they are effectively betrothed, and will raise their annual brood together. United against life.
I wondered if this was true, so I decided to report it out. The first answer I got was that, yes, it seems to be, in a way, for specifically Adélie penguins, the most widespread variant. (I'd describe them as classic penguins.) The male penguin absolutely does bring rocks to the female, and they do form long-term monogamous relationships.
Illustration: Caroline Villard
There's more detail. The Antarctic, as you might imagine, is cold and wet. It's deadly to eggs that need to be kept warm and dry. So penguins build nests that are little hills of rocks with a lined dip in them. This raises the eggs above the ground so they will not be damaged by snow-melt or other water.
What we interpret as a sacred rock or an avian wedding ring may just be the male presenting material for nest-building. Showing he's a responsible father. That sounded like the sort of messy complexity and pragmatic romance that often marks reality, so I felt satisfied and smug that it was the truth.
I was wrong. It was only the very surface of a tale so graphic and unsettling that it was first written only in code, and then suppressed by the British for more than a century.
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RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.