• Question: why don't penguins and chickens fly when other birds do?

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 21 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      Penguins don’t fly because they have no natural land predators in Antarctica that they’d have to fly away from. Instead they became really good swimmers to get away from seals etc! That’s how evolution works – things only develop if there’s a need for them.
      With chickens, they used to fly, but humans started selectively breading them so they had bigger breast muscles and there there was more meat on each chicken. In the end the muscles got so big that they couldn’t fly any more!
      So penguins can’t fly because nature doesn’t need them to, and it’s our fault chickens can’t fly!

    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Jenny is pretty spot on. By evolving to use their wings as flippers rather than for flying gave penguins a better chances of survival and so penguins with this mutation survived to pass on their genes.

      A chicken managed to fly in the movie Chicken Run. What do you mean they are plasticine and not real?

    • Photo: Phillip Manning

      Phillip Manning answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Penguins do fly, albeit in a very viscous medium….water! This is why they have a fusiform shape and wings for underwater flight.

      Chickens have been bred, not evolved, to have smaller wings relative to body mass (we like eating a larger body…so they have been bred for this purpose). The ancestors of chickens could fly!

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