Published: Wednesday, June 5, 2013
NEW ORLEANS - Three endangered African penguin chicks are swimming about with adult penguins on display at the New Orleans aquarium.
The gray-and-white chicks hatched in March and will get their black-and-white plumage in about a year.
The
Aquarium of the Americas announced their presence Wednesday, two days
after the chicks joined more than two dozen adult African penguins and
three rockhopper penguins from South America. All three were tiny
"preemies" which had to be helped out of their eggs after cracking the
shells in an incubator, said senior aviculturist Darwin Long.
Aquarium
staff wore waders for the hand-raised birds' first introduction to
water deeper than the tub where they learned to swim, he said. The next
step was keeping an eye on the youngsters from outside their enclosure.
"If
we're not in there, all of a sudden it's like the kids are off on their
own in school, things can happen .... Some birds will snip at them,
test them - `Who are you?' They're also playing. They battle with each
other, peck each other," much as kittens wrestle, he said.
When
the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the species
endangered in 2010, an estimated 75,000 to 80,000 African penguins,
also called blackfooted penguins, lived in the wild, breeding on 25
islands and four mainland sites in Namibia and South Africa.
The organization said numbers had fallen about 90 percent during the 20th century, and were continuing to plummet.
There are many reasons for
the collapse, most of them caused by people, said Steven J. Sarro,
curator of the National Zoo and species survival plan coordinator for
African penguins.
Those
include collecting and selling their eggs as food; overfishing of the
penguins' main foods, pilchards and Cape anchovies; oil spills - a spill
in 1994 and another in 2000 killed a total of 30,000 penguins,
according to the IUCN - and guano mining.
"The
islands used to have a deep bed of guano" - reportedly sometimes more
than 40 feet deep, Sarro said. "The birds would nest in the guano;
they'd dig burrows. That's fairly safe from predators that prey on the
eggs."
Nineteenth century entrepreneurs mined that guano down to the rock, making it impossible for the penguins to burrow, Sarro said.
Fiberglass
"nest caves" are being put on some of the islands to help out, Long
said. "You can just place hundreds and hundreds in a colony and birds
use them right away."
Audubon has raised 46 chicks since the Aquarium opened in 1990 and now has 31 African and three southern rockhopper penguins.
Long
said Audubon's newest chicks will be used in outreach programs rather
than for breeding - although each had different parents, one pair of
birds is either grandparents or great-grandparents to all three.
The aquarium hasn't had space to put selected pairs together in hopes they'll form a mating bond, he said.
The
male, hatched March 23, was named Skua because he had a huge appetite.
"He'd gobble everything in sight - 20 fish a day sometimes," Long said.
"His appetite is leveling off to something more reasonable - five, six,
seven fish a day."
Long dubbed the chicks that
hatched March 9 and 14 Hubie and Marina, after the male and female stars
of the 1994 animated movie "The Pebble and the Penguin," only to learn
that Hubie is female.
He
said the sexes look so much alike that DNA is the only way to tell, but,
"The first chick was growing at such a fast rate I thought, `This has
got to be a guy.'"
The aquarium will hold a contest to name the former Hubie.
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Online:
Audubon penguins live on Animal Planet: http://bit.ly/16KFvgS
Source:The Daily Comet
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