Question: Why can't penguins fly?

Nuala Carson answered on 27 Jun 2012:

Hey milachinchilla,

I suppose the simplest answer is that penguins don’t fly because they don’t need to. They eat fish so flying would have no advantage to them. This is why over time they have evolved to become better suited to swimming and living in the ocean environment. Their ‘wings’ are too small to keep them up in the air but are perfectly suited being used as flippers, navigating them round in the water. They have a few other characteristics which make them better suited to the water such as really small tightly packed feathers whihc make them more streamline, which birds that fly have longer fluffier feathers.