Executive Vice President Brenna is here today to help us celebrate Penguin Awareness Day! Take it away, Brenna!

Are you aware of how awesome penguins are? Because, I assume, you’re already aware of the existence of the penguin itself—maybe you wear shirts or you have read a book or have even had to re-rail your pool table, as one does. Penguins seem to appear in our consciousness fully formed, but the funnest facts about them must be found.

Cool Fact 1: Nobody knows how many species there are! Biologists refuse to commit to a number, saying there are 17-20 species, depending on whether you’d consider the White Wing to be a subspecies of the Little Blue, or the Royal to be a color-morph of a Rockhopper, etc., etc. It’s complicated. So let’s say there are close to 20-ish.

Cool Fact 2: Penguins have cool names. The smallest species is called either Little Blue (if you’re in New Zealand) or Fairy penguin (if you’re in Australia). The classic model featured in “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” is called the Adélie, named for the wife of the French explorer who discovered them in 1840. (Don’t be misled by the updated cover—those are Gentoos! Someone didn’t do their research!!) The Macaroni penguin, one of the crested kinds, was named for being exceedingly fashionable and not, as I thought as a child, for having feathers the same color as Kraft mac and cheese.

Cool Fact 3: Penguins can’t skate. When they hit an icy patch, they will toboggan on their bellies to get around. They also cannot surf, but nobody told Lisa Frank that.

Cool Fact 4: Penguins swim wicked fast. On average, they swim about 4-7 miles per hour, but the Gentoo can get up to 22 mph! And considering scientists trace their origins to about 15 million years earlier than toothed whales, it’s unfair that their swim style is called porpoising. (Besides, dolphins only swim about 18 miles per hour! Weak!) This skill enables them to evade orcas (they’re not friends!), catch krill, and save Santa.

Cool Fact 5: Penguins have bad feather days. Penguins—they’re just like us! Once a year, they go through 2-3 weeks of catastrophic molting, so named because it wreaks havoc on the waterproofing and insulating qualities of their dense feathers and they can’t go in the water while they wait for the transition to finish. Auk-ward!

Cool Fact 6: Penguins love who they want to love. Not only are they among the many species that form same-gender parenting families, they can make friends with minke whales. And humans.

Cool Fact 7: Penguins stay down south. Their habitats follow cold water currents, so while you can get within a few degrees of the equator and find them, you won’t see them chilling with any polar bears.

That’s not all there is to know about penguins, but that’s where I stop this week!