A "criminal" stone-stealing Adelie penguin has been captured on camera by a BBC film crew.
The team, filming for the documentary Frozen Planet, spent four months with the penguin colony on Ross Island, Antarctica.
The footage they captured shows a male penguin stealing stones from its neighbour's nest.
The birds build their stone nests to elevate and protect their eggs from run-off when the Antarctic ice melts.
Males with the best nests are more likely to attract a mate, so, in a colony of half a million penguins, the best stones are highly prized.
In the chaos of the penguin colony, cameraman Mark Smith managed to capture a remarkable sequence, with one penguin repeatedly returning to its nest to add stones, apparently unaware of the fact that his neighbor would steal a stone every time his nest was unattended.
The team, filming for the documentary Frozen Planet, spent four months with the penguin colony on Ross Island, Antarctica.
The footage they captured shows a male penguin stealing stones from its neighbour's nest.
The birds build their stone nests to elevate and protect their eggs from run-off when the Antarctic ice melts.
Males with the best nests are more likely to attract a mate, so, in a colony of half a million penguins, the best stones are highly prized.
In the chaos of the penguin colony, cameraman Mark Smith managed to capture a remarkable sequence, with one penguin repeatedly returning to its nest to add stones, apparently unaware of the fact that his neighbor would steal a stone every time his nest was unattended.
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