Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 10, 2026

Using a Thermal Camera to Measure Heat Loss Through Bird Feather Coats
Published on: June 17, 2020
Unique pattern of molt leads to low intraindividual variation in feather mercury concentrations in penguins
Rebecka L Brasso1, Bridgette E Drummond, Stuart R Borrett
1Department of Biology and Marine Biology, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, North Carolina, USA. rlb1196@uncw.edu
Abstract:
The authors hypothesized that the catastrophic annual molt of penguins (Sphenisciformes) would lead to reduced intraindividual variation of mercury concentrations in body feathers. While mean mercury concentrations varied significantly among 8 penguin species, intraindividual variability did not differ among species and was 3 times lower than values observed in other seabirds. The findings of the present study suggest that a single body feather collected at random per individual can be adequate to estimate mercury exposure at the population level in penguins.
Related Concept Videos
Mate Choice
Frequency-dependent Selection
Limits to Natural Selection
Migration
Testing a Claim about Mean: Unknown Population SD
Estimating a population mean requires the samples to be approximately normally distributed. The data should be collected from the randomly selected samples having no sampling bias. There is no specific requirement for sample size. But if the sample size is less than 30, and we don't know the population standard deviation, a different approach is used; instead...
Complementation Tests
Organisms heterozygous for different mutations are crossed pairwise in all combinations. If present on different genes, the mutations can complement each other by providing the missing...

