Meet our
Penguin Crush characters!

Hello I am a little Sprat and my name begins with S, the first letter of the Sea which is where I live. I am quite small, and l have to watch out for much bigger fish who might see me as their lunch. Luckily, I am a fast swimmer and I can swim away quickly. Did you know Sprats travel in large group called schools? Our relatives are herring, mackerel, anchovy and sardine.

Hello my name is Mr Fish and I swim beneath the ice of the North Pole. I must keep moving to keep myself warm as I look for my lunch. Did you know that there is a North Pole and a South Pole? Did you know that some of us have adapted to the bitter cold by developing an antifreeze protein in our blood that allows us to survive? We never encounter ice in Antarctica as we live too deep in the sea.

Hello I am Miss Penguin. I love to jump in and out of the sea playing with my friends. In this book we have swam all the way from the South Pole to the North Pole. I had never seen a Polar Bear before and I don’t want to see one ever again. They are big!! Some of us can reach amazing dives close to 550 metres and we can survive up to 22 minutes under the water! Our black backs blend in with the ocean water if you look at us from above, while our white bellies match the bright surface if you look at us from below. This disguises us from our predators like leopard seals and helps us to catch our food like fish, squid, crabs and krill.

My name is Mr Polar Bear and I am the biggest animal at the North Pole. My fur is pure white so that I can hide in the snow and creep up on other animals. I sleep in the snow every night, but my thick fur keeps me warm. Did you know that I am an excellent swimmer? My hunting and eating habits depend completely on the sea ice, seals depend on it and seals are the only food source with a high fat content and enough calories to keep me healthy. I can only catch seals from the platform of sea ice. I rely also on ice for travelling, breeding, and denning.

I am an Eskimo but I prefer to be called an Inuit and I live in the far North where we have some of the harshest and coldest temperatures known to man. We do not have many shops in the north and things like fruit and vegetables are scarce and expensive to import so we have to hunt animals to stay alive and we make our clothes from their skins and furs. We love the animals without them we could not survive. We live in a very cold environment and we rely heavily on meats such as caribou, walrus and seal and we eat various fish and birds and sometimes hunt polar bears and foxes. There are many traditional ways we prepare our food: drying, cooking in seal oil, or burying it until it ferments naturally. Frozen, raw whitefish is a delicacy and although we eat a lot of meat we are among the healthiest people in the world. We make shelters called igloos, for us "igloo" is just a word for a building people live in and not a small snow dome.