Peter Haddon

speaker

51 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Peter Haddon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Science Show · Looking inside cells, and how seals hear so well underwater · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

So the penguin is instead doing most of its focusing in the lens.

Basically, when it goes from air to water, it doesn't really matter that you lose the corneal power because most of the focusing is being done in the lens anyway.

The lens is more spherical, but it's not completely spherical.

Like fish actually have quite spherical lenses.

We don't know a lot about the penguin lens and how it operates.

But one thing they do do is they are able to change the power of the lens quite substantially.

The penguin eye does seem to have a relatively large aperture, basically pupil, for the length of the eye.

And that'll probably increase the light gathering ability of the retina too.

So yeah, the 444 meters an emperor penguin dove to in winter, which is very near Antarctica, which obviously will be very dark there.

And 564, again, an emperor penguin is the deepest one that I've been recorded diving to.

We kind of roughly know how well penguins should be able to see in terms of, you know, if you're a penguin looking at letters on the eye chart.

And you could see the top few, but you definitely couldn't see as far down as a human.

That's just looking at the anatomy of the penguin eye.

We actually haven't been able to do experiments that can tell us exactly how far down the eye chart they can see.

That's another thing I'm working on, actually.

I'd love to see that experiment.

I've devised the experiment.

I've had a go, but it's not up to scratch.

Can I ask, what did you do?

So we got a projector and projected stripes against the wall in the aquarium and made them move round and round and saw if the penguin followed them and made the stripes thinner and thinner and closer together until they lost interest.

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