Penguin Feet
& The Great Apartment Freeze
The other week the apartment was cold: not the cold of drafty windows and first wintry frost, but rather the kind that drove my three roommates and I to layer in holiday sweaters, rain jackets, and puffers like scientists at an Antarctic research station. With blankets wrapped around our toes we huddled together (perhaps more like penguins than researchers) around the wobbling flame of the singular chestnut spice candle in our living room. You may have already guessed, but we are college students, and, like college students, we had to work. We clamped our fingers around pencils and retreated into the caves of our jacket sleeves. Only lead and wood were left exposed to the biting air, like captain hook if he were an academic, or like a penguin leaning back on its heels and tail in the coldest conditions to keep its toes from the ice.
We would have been better off as penguins. Every anatomical component, from short, stiff feathers that trap and warm air to the flippers of thick skin and bone that take the brunt of the ice from the controlling muscles and tendons in the leg above, is designed to manage heat and energy. Even the arrangement of veins and arteries in the foot suits this purpose.
A related tangent: this summer I worked at a water treatment plant (a long story). There was one machine that removed dissolved salts by heating water until it evaporated. In order to save time and money and energy, the pipes were arranged so that the hot steam exiting the machine ran right alongside the pipe carrying cold water into the machine. The salt solution was, in a way, preheated which meant that less energy overall was needed to run the machine. This strategy is called countercurrent heat exchange, but, as I learned, penguins and other seabirds were using it long before we thought to name it as such. More specifically, the veins and arteries in and above penguin flippers are arranged so that the warm blood entering the foot passes right by the cold blood circulating back to the heart which causes heat to remain within the system instead of being lost to the Antarctic cold.
In the end, penguins are able to survive unthinkable temperatures because, unlike my roommates and I, their bodies and behaviors are built to do so. When it comes to heat and resources, nature is the strictest of bankers and penguins wouldn't be around if they weren't good managers. In the words of Janine Benyus, naturalist and founder of the Biomimicry Institute, “When we look at what is truly sustainable, the only real model that has worked over long periods of time is the natural world.” Biomimicry is the practice of taking nature’s strategies - perfected over billions of years - and applying them to solve human design and sustainability challenges such as reducing energy lost in machines or, ideally, staying warm in a frigid apartment. Luckily for us, we were not penguins and our captain hook hands allowed us to jab out an inquiring email to the landlords.
