Meme Encyclopedia recorded it as the Nihilistic Penguin. The small penguin specimen that leaves instead of reaching the colony towards the mountains. In the background an organ version of L’amour toujours by Gigi D’Agostino. You can find it on Spotify as L’amour toujours (Epic Penguin Edit). It lasts four minutes and the musician who plays it perhaps put in a little too much of his own.
The scene is also cute, for goodness sake. The problem is the dosage. But now it happens for every meme. At first it’s a pleasant discovery while you’re doing one nice scrolling session. Then you smile when you see the first references and forward it to Instagram groups with friends predisposed to collecting memes. Then it starts to get boring. And eventually it becomes unbearable.
Usually the exact moment when a meme reaches saturation is when it ends up on your smartphone social media managers who take care of brand pages. So the little penguin animated by artificial intelligence discovers a supermarket beyond the mountains, a colossal frozen drink or the stadium of a football team. We have dedicated a more specific article to the variant “conquering Greenland with Donald Trump”.
Maybe it’s better not to say the number 67, at least if you’re making a video on social media
Where does the nihilistic penguin come from
In all of this someone is starting to wonder about fate of the penguin. How are you? Did he reach the mountains? Is he still alive? A flourish has already appeared on TikTok mockumentary tour which trace the penguin’s path, show which peaks it has reached and go so far as to reveal images of the lifeless bird. But what do we really know about the fate of this penguin.
Let’s start with certain data. The scene we saw on our smartphones comes from a documentary published in 2007. As Know Your Meme reminds you, it’s called Encounters at the End of the World and was filmed by Werner Herzog. By the way, you can find it in its entirety on YouTube. After the sequence becomes meme there is another quite funny scene where one of these lonely penguins passes by the crew.
What we know about the life of the penguin
Let’s start with the species. The bird in the meme should be a Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae). Its height reaches a maximum of 70cm and how much weight is between 4 and 6 kg. Lives in Antarctica. Let’s remember: penguins are only found in the areas around the South Pole. In the northern hemisphere they are only found in zoos or in Polaretti advertisements.
They are much smaller in size than the more well-known ones Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), a bird capable of reaching 1.3 meters in height and 40 kg in weight as an adult. Just to complete this ornithological review we also remember Pesto, who became famous in September 2024. It was an enormous chick of King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) which was found in Melbourne’s Sea Life Aquarium.
The documentary penguin as good probability he wasn’t looking for adventure or financial freedomas some fuffaguru would have us believe. He had an orientation problem. Penguins have a very sophisticated system for understanding where they are and where they want to go. Sometimes this system gets stuck and so they become animals vagrantsa word used in biology to indicate animals observed far from the areas where they live. On Geopop you will find an in-depth study on an ethological theme.
So what happened to the penguin in the documentary? Well. A expedition among the ice of Antarctica searching for it wouldn’t yield many results. According to the Australia Antarctic Program, specimens of this species have a life expectancy between 10 and 20 years. Since the documentary is from 2007 and the penguin looks like an adult specimen, it is unlikely that it has survived to this day. The second problem is the diet. This species of penguins feeds on fish, small crustaceans and krilltiny crustaceans at the center of the diet of many marine animals. Including whales. All elements that are difficult to find in the icy mountains towards which the penguin moves.
