Aquarium Welcomes Baby Penguin
Penguin chick, Roxy and Floyd Credit: Robin Riggs
June 20, 2017
A Magellanic Penguin chick hatched at the Aquarium in late May and will be on view on a live webcam starting Friday, June 23. Parents Roxy and Floyd, residents of the Aquarium’s June Keyes Penguin Habitat, cared for the baby penguin until it was ready to go to its behind-the-scenes nursery to learn to take whole fish from keepers for feedings and to swim in shallow pools. The chick will be on public view when it joins the other birds in the penguin habitat sometime in August. Around that time, the Aquarium expects to know if the baby penguin is male or female.
This year’s chick represents the fifth generation of Aquarium-born penguins and is the tenth to hatch here. Two penguins hatched in 2016: Fisher and Astaire. One penguin hatched in 2015 (Lily), four hatched in 2014 (Paddles, Jayde, Mattson, and Skipper) and two hatched in 2013 (Heidi and Anderson).
In celebration of the baby bird, the Aquarium is offering the opportunity to adopt the chick through its Adopt an Animal program. Those adopting a penguin chick at the $100 level or higher before September 30, 2017, will have a chance to go behind the scenes for a feeding and training session with the penguins.
Magellanic Penguins are a temperate species native to the coasts of Argentina and Chile in South America. It takes between thirty-eight and forty-three days of incubation before a Magellanic Penguin egg will hatch. Magellanic Penguin parents take turns incubating the eggs on the nest and feeding and raising the chicks after they hatch. The chicks fledge, or replace their downy newborn feathers with watertight adult feathers, after about ninety days.
The Penguin Nest Cam is available courtesy of explore.org, the philanthropic multimedia arm of the Annenberg Foundation.
