Each of the aquarium’s adult penguins has a tag with colored beads on it that identify the bird. The first bead in the set indicates the penguin’s sex, and the next four its “name.”
Mystic Aquarium Senior Penguin Trainer Sarah Dunn holds the newest edition to the aquarium’s African penguin colony last month. The penguin chick is kept separate from the rest of the colony until its juvenile feathers come in, meaning it will be ready to take its first swim. The chick’s sex is unknown, and won’t be known until a blood test is done when it reaches adulthood.
Posted: Monday, May 7, 2012
The chick, named Blue Pink, took its first swim in the penguin exhibit on Tuesday. Once it learns to dive and swim using its wings and feet, it will be introduced to the other 27 penguins in the aquarium’s Roger Tory Peterson Penguin Exhibit.
In the early 1900s, there were more than 1 million African penguins in the wild. Today, the population is more frequently cited in terms of “breeding pairs,” because it has declined to the point that every egg hatched is of vital importance to the survival of the species. The number of wild African penguins has declined by more than 90 percent in the last century, and the population has yet to stabilize. There are currently 64 percent fewer penguins in Africa than there were in 2001.
In the face of such daunting numbers, it would be easy to write off the penguin chick that took its first swim this week at Mystic Aquarium as insignificant. And while it’s true that one bird in captivity in the United States is not going to save the species, Margaret Roestorf believes the aquarium’s chick – and others like it in zoos and aquariums around North America – have a role to play in its survival.
“They are ambassadors for their wild cousins,” Roestorf said. “(Visitors to the aquarium) might be seeing the one chick that’s being raised in captivity, but that one chick is a symbol for the thousands of chicks that are dying in the wild.”
Roestorf is fund-raising and marketing coordinator for SANCCOB, the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, an organization working to stem the tide of decline among wild penguins and attempting to identify its causes.
One of those causes is the abandonment of chicks, which happens when the wild birds molt in the wrong season, Roestorf said. What causes the birds to molt in the wrong season is unknown, she said.
“They molt at the wrong time,” Roestorf said. “Normally, what would happen is you would molt when you don’t have a chick, but they’ve got chicks. So the minute they start to molt they don’t eat, they don’t go in the water, they pretty much just hang around until it’s over … so what happens with these little chicks is they just basically stand in the colony and they die.”
To combat this, SANCCOB has been rescuing abandoned chicks and hand-rearing them in much the same way the chick at the aquarium is currently being raised.
At the aquarium, chicks are kept separate from the rest of the colony until they’ve shed their soft down and replaced it with waterproof juvenile feathers. A trainer feeds the penguin chick 5 percent of its body weight in fish, three times per day.
Though this year’s chick is only a few months old, Senior Penguin Trainer Sarah Dunn said it has already begun to show one of the most outgoing penguin personalities she’s encountered in her 10 years of “chick seasons.”
“Even before we’ve weaned them, you can start to see how they’re interacting with the parents,” Dunn said. “This particular bird has been one of the most inquisitive and explorative and adventurous I’ve ever worked with. We have high hopes that it will be a great encounter bird for programs.”
The chick, named Blue Pink, took its first swim in the penguin exhibit on Tuesday. Once it learns to dive and swim using its wings and feet, it will be introduced to the other 27 penguins in the aquarium’s Roger Tory Peterson Penguin Exhibit.
When a SANCCOB bird is ready to be released into the wild, it’s tagged so that its movements can be monitored and studied. Roestorf said being able to track young penguins as they travel will help scientists determine where food supplies are located and potentially identify some of the underlying problems affecting the species.
Among the many factors that could be affecting the penguin population – either by causing chick abandonment or by directly impeding colonies’ abilities to survive – are predators, human encroachment, pollution and climate change, Roestorf said.
“There’s definitely something wrong in the oceans,” she said. “Penguins are an indicator species, so what we always say is that if the penguins are in trouble, they’re an indication that all isn’t well in the ocean.”
SANCCOB is hopeful that if it can figure out what’s wrong with the oceans, or at least what’s wrong with the penguins, it will be able to stabilize and hopefully build up the penguin population. The birds the group rescues are important to that effort because they bolster existing colonies, Roestorf said. In the future, they could also be reintroduced into locations where there isn’t currently a colony, with the hope of creating a new one, she said.
“Every single penguin that we save is now important, because these threats are overwhelming,” Roestorf said. “One of the long-term goals of what we’re doing is to understand whether creating an artificial colony is something the birds would do and would be sustainable.”
While the wild penguin population is in peril, the captive population is carefully managed through a “species survival plan” designed to ensure the long-term sustainability of African penguin colonies in captivity.
The aquarium has several breeding pairs of penguins, all of which mate for life and nest annually in the spring. But while all of the aquarium’s pairs lay eggs each year, only certain eggs are allowed to hatch. Those eggs belong to penguins that have been identified in the species survival plan as important to the genetic health and diversity of the captive population, Dunn said.
Because they live longer in captivity than in the wild, and because their environments in zoos and aquariums are carefully controlled, and because there are no predators and the mortality rate for new chicks is much lower, captive penguin populations would soon far exceed the space available for them if colonies weren’t managed in this way, Dunn said.
It seems like it would be easy to use the American penguin surplus to increase the wild population, but Dunn said it’s more complicated than that. She didn’t rule it out, but said the aquarium’s partners at SANCCOB would need to determine that it was a safe and desirable option first.
“At this point, it certainly wouldn’t be recommended,” Dunn said. “(The penguins are) exposed to a lot of different bacteria here.”
African penguins are among the most researched penguin species in the world, Roestorf said, but even so, it’s difficult to say with certainty what’s wrong with them or how to fix it. While it attempts to find those answers, SANCCOB will continue to do whatever it can to help the birds survive.
“We’re going to carry on doing everything because in the absence of anything that is absolutely conclusive, one doesn’t do nothing,” Roestorf said. “All the things we’re talking about now, we’ll continue to do them.”
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