“In a colony of nearly a quarter of a million, there are plenty more fish in the sea.”

A National Geographic video of a vicious battle between two male penguins fighting over a female partner has gone massively viral in recent days. The video, which documents a 200,000-strong Penguin colony, where the penguins “have come to fix up their nests and breed” shows a male penguin discovering that his partner has decided to shack up with another penguin while he was out for a wander. Not willing to let her go without a fight, the cheated penguin engages in a vicious battle (and we don’t use the word ‘vicious’ lightly) with his partner’s new beau, trading slaps with flippers that they “use like baseball bats to club each other, delivering up to eight blows a second”. https://twitter.com/NatGeoChannel/status/794645411919065088 When the fighting stops and the female penguin once again declares her loyalties for the homewrecking penguin, her original partner then decides to launch a beak attack as both penguins try to gouge out each other’s eyes. When that doesn’t work, he decides to try and make one last mating call that also proves unsuccessful and he certainly wasn’t getting any sympathy from the narrator of the piece. “He makes one last plea to the female, but she’s got no time for losers," the narrator says. “Defeated and humiliated, he’s left out in the cold. He’ll lick his wounds and move on. In a colony of nearly a quarter of a million, there are plenty more fish in the sea.” Harsh.