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Science

Penguins Stuck In Infinite Loop 65

Posted by Hemos from the faster-and-faster-they-go dept.
mjd writes "All dressed up and nowhere to swim! ABC News reports that "the penguin pool at the San Francisco Zoo has been a daily frenzy of circle swimming by all of the 52 birds at once. The penguins start swimming in circles early in the day and rarely stop until they stagger out of the pool at dusk.""
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Penguins Stuck In Infinite Loop More

Penguins Stuck In Infinite Loop

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  • Linux Penguins (Score:3, Funny)

    by bartjan ( 197895 ) <bartjan&vrielink,net> on Monday June 16, 2003 @07:43AM (#6210723) Homepage
    We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.

    -- attributed to Linus Torvalds

  • Tux, of course (Score:3, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @07:44AM (#6210726)
    Isn't this the place for a lot of comments about the Linux community going around in circles?
  • sounds like the programming dept here... no wonder they love Linux so much ;)

    Duke

  • It sounds like they're healthy. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by anon mouse-cow-aard ( 443646 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @07:50AM (#6210749) Journal
    What's the big deal?

    I'd rather have them swim from dawn to dusk
    as they would in the wild, than sit there and gawk at the tourists. They need the exercise. This is probably the best thing that could happen to them. Mind you, I bet they're costing the zoo a fortune in herring.
    • Except in the wild, they don't swim all day from dawn to dusk. It depends on the species, but most penguins spend most of the day sitting around on the ice, or meandering about lazily.

      Swimming around in circles all day could be a sign of a problem.
      • err, sitting about lazily? I don't think so:

        This isn't the same species, but how about swimming for 18 days at a time, and diving to 500m. That doesn't sound terribly idle. (http://www.penguins.cl/king-penguins.htm)

        For this species, they migrate from Tierra Del Fuego to Brazil. That's got to be a decent swim.
        http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/accou nts/sph eniscus/s._magellanicus$narrative.html

        Or how about "The satellite data have already revealed that some penguins swim up to 300 miles from thei

    • I'm guessing this is just herd behavior, with the captive penguins realizing, in their own small way, that they have nothing better to do, so they might was well do what all the other penguins are doing. Give it another couple months and they'll probably stop or move on to something else.
    • Maybe this is caused by the enclosure being too small. I don't go to zoos that often but the penguin enclosures I've seen seem to have a water to land ratio of 1:3 or more.

      I've never seen the enclosure that they're in but maybe it needs to be refurbished.

      If it hasn't changed in years maybe they're bored with their current location and are trying to swim to somewhere new.

  • Word Association (Score:5, Funny)

    by ahknight ( 128958 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @07:53AM (#6210763)
    I saw the headline and immidiately thought "Linux and Apple?" Sad, I know.

  • 2.4.42.pre1 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) * on Monday June 16, 2003 @08:05AM (#6210832) Homepage Journal
    "Alright, who loaded a prepatch kernel on the penguins?!"

    Seriously, consider this strange behavior observed in certain primates: They spend hours swimming back and forth in pools of water, lifting heavy weights only to put them down again, until muscular exhaustion, running for hours in place, and pulling clumps of hair from their bodies with resinous substances. Obviously, they must be deranged.

    Or health fanatics.

    Consider: the penguins would normally spend all day swimming to catch fish. Now, they don't have to - fish are provided with no effort. But some part of the penguin's brain is telling it to swim, so swim they do.

    Have you ever watched any other captive animal? Horses will gallop across the field for no visible reason, dogs will run around the back yard, cats will suddenly run full tilt from room to room.

    Boredom can make animals do strange things.

    Want more proof? [slashdot.org]?

    • Re:2.4.42.pre1 (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Have you ever watched any other captive animal? Horses will gallop across the field for no visible reason, dogs will run around the back yard, cats will suddenly run full tilt from room to room.

      Some humans do this as well... suddenly putting on trainers and running around outside. Bizarre I call it!
    • I don't find it strage at all. Animals are programmed, often very narrowly, to do certain things at certain times to survive. This often involves migration. And some animals have ranges of tens or hundreds of miles. But where are you gonna go when you are in a zoo? Poor confused animals.

    • Re:2.4.42.pre1 (Score:4, Funny)

      by shadowbearer ( 554144 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @09:43AM (#6211521) Homepage Journal
      RTA. This behavior wasn't shown by them until a new group of penguins was introduced to the pool. It's apparently some kind of "copycat" behavior.

      Although I agree with you about strange primate behavior :-) Some of them even sit and stare at moving images on electronic devices for hours at a time ...

      Heh.

      SB
    • The only thing left to do now is put live herrings in the pool so the penguins can increase their fishing skills.
    • cats will suddenly run full tilt from room to room.

      *phew*

      That explains our cats. Maybe I should just let a bunch of rats run around the house so I can get some sleep at night.
    • That's nothing. Give a human a little stick connected to a base in such a way that you can waggle about the other and, and connect it via an electronic gizmo called a 'console' to a display and you can make some humans waggle that stick almost continuously until they need food and/or sleep.
    • My cats do that too. Get all wide eyed and go nuts. running all over the place.

  • Omaha Hennry Doorly Zoo penguin webcam (Score:5, Informative)

    by ubiquitin ( 28396 ) * on Monday June 16, 2003 @08:22AM (#6210921) Homepage Journal
    Circle swimming happens every so often in the penguin exhibit at the Omaha Zoo. They have a very nice display, which happens to include a penguin webcam [66.37.232.214]. I think for the most part the Omaha penguins are more laid back than their San Francisco inmates. Also, here is a map of the aquarium where the keep the penguins. [omahazoo.com] Enjoy.

  • Oh my God! (Score:2, Funny)

    by orkysoft ( 93727 )
    "She's stuck in an infinite loop and he's just stupid!" - Prof. Farnsworth.

  • Noticed similar behavior in polar bears... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by andrewski ( 113600 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @08:54AM (#6211118) Homepage
    At the zoo in Portland, the polar bears engaged in a bizarre, ritualistic dance that they repeated endlessly. I watched the smaller bear walk backwards around a cement habitat element (pillar-like) and then walk backwards over behind a log, do a strange gesture, and then do the whole routine forwards. The larger bear would sit on the log and very slowly swipe at the smaller bear, alternating with frenzied tearing at his log.

    I was photographing them, so I noticed the behavior repeating itself, and I asked my girlfriend if she noticed anything strange. She confirmed that the bears were doing a ritualistic sort of routine. At first we kinda laughed, and then as the bears just kept repeating this same pattern over and over, with almost robotic precision, we both began so feel pretty sickened. It seems to me that they have pretty much gone insane.
    • Discover magazine just ran an article about some research in this directly with lab animals.

      This is extremely common in lab animals, its called stereotypical or stereotype actions. Mice will spend hours turning backflips or jumping up and down in the same spot. We're talking rep rates of 10's of thousands of times a night.

      This is of course a bad thing from an animal rights perspective, its like lifetime solitary confinement in a ultra-max prision. But these animals are very bad test subjects, their bra
      • Stereotype actions. I can see that as you take animals with wide ranges / rich social lives out of their purview in cage 'em up, they need to vent their desires for interaction / stimulation / etc.

        IMHO, the Minnesota Zoo is better than most I have been to. Big animals have many acres to roam in, the siberian tiger encloure is enormous. Most days you don't even see 'em. In the summer hoewver, they sit by the huge Plexiglass window and watch the children bathe in the fountain.

        The Henry Doorly Zoo (Omaha
  • it runs infinite loops in 12 hours!

  • For a minute there... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Paul Burney ( 560340 ) * on Monday June 16, 2003 @09:29AM (#6211383) Homepage
    Anyone else think from the headline that the story was about Linus Torvalds not being able to find his way out from a meeting at Apple headquarters....

  • I've got the same problem... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Muad'Dave ( 255648 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @10:02AM (#6211721) Homepage

    I wake up in the morning, drag myself to work, go home exhausted, and do it all over again, day after day. I don't even get free fish!

  • I wonder if the zoo where the six introduced penguins came from had the same problem? Or if those penguins didn't do it until they got to the new place...maybe they are trying to migrate back to Ohio ;~)
  • January 16, 2003?

    It's a cool story, but about six months late, eh?

    'jfb

  • a protest? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder if they, finding no other way to communicate to humans their intelligence, started swimming in circles as a act of organized protest for their living conditions.

  • hhgttg (Score:3, Funny)

    by hitchhacker ( 122525 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @12:33PM (#6213522) Homepage

    It's just the penguins way of saying "So long and thanks for all the fish."

    oh crap. :(

    -metric
  • How is this news? Toy stores have for many years been selling devices that make little penguins go around in circles. :P I wonder where they got the idea? (last sentance is not sarcastic but an actual question i have)
  • Sounds like the new penguins brought in a new religion and the rest were converted - the Penguin sect anyone?

  • Ummm (Score:1)

    by NaDrew ( 561847 )
    This was interesting news when it happened, back in November. They went back to "normal" behavior in about March. The date on the linked story is January 16. Why is this posted now?
  • ...for my personal penguin page [gdargaud.net]. Yes, I did coding and hardware butchering down in Antarctica for about 2 years.

  • Not anymore they don't (Score:3, Informative)

    by azav ( 469988 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @06:02PM (#6217312) Homepage Journal
    This is old news. In fact they stopped swimming about a month ago.

    This all started when some new pengies were added to the exhibit. They started on their little migration and the rest just followed them.

    I think they are done now. We'll have to wait till next year and see what happens then.

  • The six penguins from Ohio started it all, Tollini said, apparently convincing the others to join them for the watery daily circuit.

    Great! Six workout nuts convinced the nerd penguins to get in shape. Next thing you know, they'll all start dating. This means the next release will be months late.
  • Who won the Race in the Penguin Pool?

    Dolemite
    __________________________
  • This happens in bored caged animals (and people). One term for it is "cage stereotypies". The link that follows talks about it some. It is definitely not funny.

    http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/pressreleases/02_09 _1 1_fsrut.html
  • Is this yet another defintions of a Bog Mip?
  • Perhaps we could use the rotating penguins to drive a generating turbine ;)

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