This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher and Daljata.

Hundreds of miles southeast of New Zealand you'll find the wind swept, bounty, and

antipodes islands. It's there you'll find the breeding grounds of what may be

the world's most punk rock penguin, which sports twin bleach blonde mohawks.

So it's like if you took a penguin and you put it's flipper and electricity out

and it got a shock. That's what you might imagine it looks like.

Lloyd Davis of New Zealand's University of Otago says the erect crested penguin,

as it's known, also has a peculiar breeding strategy.

The females lay two eggs, but generally leave the first one to die.

They just plop the egg down on the rock and you know it's just bizarre to see.

And then 40% of them, they just turn their back on it as they don't even attempt to incubate it.

It's like, yeah, I don't care about that.

Davis says that's unusual because most birds pour resources into the first egg in the second

and however many more, but the last egg is almost an afterthought.

The finally egg just acts like an insurance policy for them so that they lose one of the other eggs

and they can rear the chick from that one.

But this is quite the opposite because in this case they, and this is why it's such a conundrum

biological world is that they don't favor the first egg.

They favor the second one.

Davis and his colleagues traveled to the Antipodes Islands in 1998 to investigate that conundrum.

And in re-analysing their data, they've narrowed down the possible explanations for the behavior.

For one, they think the penguins might reject that first egg because it forms while the birds are migrating.

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