Zoo Plans to Separate Gay Penguins

Analysis by Jennifer Viegas
Mon Nov 7, 2011

Buddy and Pedro, two African penguins at the Toronto Zoo, are inseparable and show signs of same sex mating behaviors. But the zoo plans to break the pair apart soon, according to a report in The Toronto Star.
That's because the two males were intended for a breeding program, which could help strengthen their species in captivity. Buddy and Pedro are said to have quality genes that would pass on to any offspring they might father.


Gay male penguin couples appear to be fairly common. The Central Park zoo has turned out to be the Castro of the penguin world, with several homosexual pairs observed there. Perhaps the most famous couple is Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins who incubated an egg and together raised the hatched chick, named Tango. A children's book, And Tango Makes Three, chronicles this event of about 6 years ago.

Gay penguins have also been noted from Sea World Orlando and zoos in Japan and Germany. Homosexuality in general has been documented in at least 1500 species.

As a SheWired story points out, "gay" or "homosexual" aren't usually the terms used by animal keepers. In zoo speak it is termed "pair bonding." Buddy and Pedro apparently forged their connection in Toledo, Ohio, where they were members of a bachelor flock. It's a May-December pairing too, as Buddy is 20 years old and Pedro is 10.

According to the Toroto Star report, they emit mating calls to each other, which sound like braying donkeys. They also swim and frolic together, regularly groom each other, and pair off together every night.
“It’s a complicated issue, but they seem to be in a loving relationship of some sort," Joe Torzsok, chair of the Toronto zoo board, was quoted as saying in the news story.

So what should win out—the established penguin pairing or the zoo's need for breeding? So far, the latter appears to be Buddy and Pedro's fate.
African penguins, native to South Africa, have experienced significant population drops in recent years due to pollution, commercial fisheries encroaching on their food supply in the wild, and other mostly human-caused problems. At present, the penguin's numbers are dropping by 2 percent a year, with only 224,000 or so known to exist in the world.

To learn more about all of the Toronto Zoo's African penguins, Download MediaKit-Penguins.

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