[2] Predators of the king penguin include giant petrels, skuas, the snowy sheathbill, the leopard seal, and the orca.

[1] In 1778, the English illustrator John Frederick Miller included a hand-coloured engraving of the king penguin in his Icones animalium et plantarum.

The juvenile king penguin with its long bill and heavy dark brown down is completely different in appearance from the mostly grey emperor chick with its black and white mask.

By the early 1920s, the king penguin population in South Georgia and the Falklands was nearly wiped out by whalers on these islands.

As the Falklands and South Georgia had no trees to use for firewood, the whalers burned millions of oily, blubber-rich penguins as fuel.

The non-breeding range is unknown; many vagrant birds have been seen on the Antarctic peninsula as well as in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

[17] The Nature Protection Society released several king penguins at Gjesvær in Finnmark and Røst in Lofoten in northern Norway in August, 1936.

[22] The king penguin dives during daylight hours to depths of 100–300 meters (350–1000 feet), spending around five minutes submerged, and to less than 30 metres (98 ft) at night.

[26] Using the average swimming speed, Kooyman estimated the distance travelled to foraging areas at 28 km (17 mi).

On land, the king penguin alternates between walking with a wobbling gait and tobogganing—sliding over the ice on its belly, propelled by its feet and wing-like flippers.

[24] Lanternfish are the main fish taken, principally the species Electrona carlsbergi and Krefftichthys anderssoni, as well as Protomyctophum tenisoni.

[41] The king penguin has a prolonged breeding cycle, taking around 14–16 months from laying to offspring fledging.

Hatching may take up to 2–3 days to complete and chicks are born semi-altricial and nidicolous: they have only a thin covering of down, and are entirely dependent on their parents for food and warmth.

By April, the chicks are almost fully grown but lose weight while fasting over the winter months, gaining it again during spring in September.

Continuous ocean warming could cause the convergence zone to move polewards, away from king penguin breeding sites like the Falklands and the Crozet Islands.

It has been suggested that if carbon emissions continue to rise at their current rate, king penguins will need to travel an additional 200 km in order to reach their feeding areas.

Ongoing attempts to further develop this fishery for human consumption close to key penguin foraging areas are likely to have negative impacts on food provisioning.

The Trust also recommends precautionary management of the Antarctic krill fishery in order to protect king penguins' main source of food.

The CCAMLR is made up of 24 countries (plus the European Union); among those are the United States and China, which have been withholding the authority to enact such protective measures.

[51] It has also been suggested that in conservation modeling, special attention be paid to the southernmost breeding locations, given the predicted rise in water temperature in the Southern Ocean, and that complete regular censuses of breeding populations be carried out to detect temporal trends and environmental changes.

[1] The steady population of king penguins is due largely to current conservation efforts to protect nesting habitats.

Ecotourism and public access to all king penguin breeding sites are heavily restricted in order to prevent outbreaks of disease and general disturbance.

All of the colonies in Crozet and Kerguelen Islands are protected under the oversight of the Reserve Naturelle Nationales des Terres australes et Antarctiques Françaises.

[50] The king penguin is considered a flagship species in zoos and aquaria, and 176 individuals were counted in captivity in North America in 1999.