Abstract
This preliminary study, conducted in January–February 2020, investigates the potential presence of self-awareness in a population of wild Adélie penguins on the Dog’s Neck Ice Shelf and on Svenner Island in East Antarctica. It is based on the responses and reactions of individual penguins to images, generated in mirrors during three experimental paradigms: a group-behaviour test; a modified mirror test and a hidden-head test. We believe that this set of experiments constitutes possibly the first investigations into the potential presence of self-awareness in any penguin species and is pioneering in conducting a set of cognitive experiments on free-ranging individuals of a nonhuman species in its natural environment, without any prior familiarisation, conditioning or acclimatisation to the experimental paradigms employed. Future studies, integrating the socioecology and cognitive ethology of penguins, may provide insights into whether our experimental paradigms could provide evidence to confirm the presence of self-awareness and even of self-recognition in this species and examine whether the observed social awareness may have evolved due to the social needs of individual penguins to engage in cooperative behaviour with conspecific individuals, while maintaining their independent decision-making capacities, throughout their communal lives.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
¶ We dedicate this paper to the fond memory of the late David Walton of the British Antarctic Survey, United Kingdom, who showed keen interest in this work but did not wait to see it in its final form.
