I Have Seen the Future and it is Penguin.

Good news on the penguin front!  You didn't know there was a penguin front?  Well there is and there's good news on it.  Apparently penguins convert salt water to fresh.  Yep what you always thought was a short black and white waste of space is in actual fact a fish powered, over dressed desalination plant.  This is great news for humans and, by extension, penguins.

Access to fresh water is one of the current concerns of various doomsayers who have been predicting the end of the human race pretty much since its beginning.  Despite the source of the warning it has to be admitted that there are areas of the globe that could do with a little more fresh water than they currently possess.  Water itself isn't a problem, the planet is lousy with the stuff.  Unfortunately most of it is of the salty variety and that isn't terribly helpful for supporting life.  At least, not our sort of life, it has to be admitted that fish and, of course, penguins don't seem to have a problem with it.

In fact penguins don't actually convert salt water into fresh however they have a gland (isn't there always a gland?) called the supraorbital gland which is incredibly efficient at filtering the salt out of seawater thus leaving one with perfectly fresh, if slightly penguin flavoured, water.  When I say "one" I mean the penguin, at the moment but all that could change.

Desalination plants are going to become a thing of the past.  Sure they work but they're big, ugly, expensive and they chew a lot of power.  In the future all we're going to have to do is rip the supraorbital gland off a few million penguins, stitch them together and filter seawater through them.  With the money we save not building desalination plants we can pipe this eau de penguin into the parched and generally water deprived sections of the planet for the benefit of all.  We can make a little cash on the side by selling the remainder of the penguin as a stuffed toy for kids.

Now that you have seen the future you will have noticed that while there is an abundance of fresh water there is also a huge pile of penguin corpses blotting out the sun.  This should help with global warming or at least provide a little shade. 

At this point you are probably looking back at my first paragraph and wondering exactly where is the upside I promised for the penguins.  Wonder no longer for the answer is simple.  For this fresh water scheme to work we're going to need a lot of penguins, far more than nature carelessly provided.  The obvious answer is a breeding program.  I envision huge penguin farms spanning the chillier parts of the globe to cater to our endless need for fresh water.  This will be the salvation of the penguin, no animal ever went extinct after we started farming it.  We kill millions of cows and sheep each year and we don't seem to be running out of them.  Of course all these penguins will need feeding so I think we can all agree that our fish stocks are doomed.