Gay Male Penguins Raise a Chick at Syracuse Zoo

A gay penguin couple at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York, are now raising the chick who hatched from the egg they successfully incubated.

Elmer and Lima, two male penguins, are the first same-sex penguin parents at the zoo, which is home to an internationally-renowned program to save Humboldt penguins, which have been classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as “vulnerable,” meaning they are at high risk of becoming extinct in the wild unless the circumstances threatening its survival and reproduction improve.

The same-sex foster couple is a first for the zoo, which has relied on foster parents to incubate eggs in the past. The zoo has at least two breeding pairs of penguins with a history of inadvertently breaking their fertilized eggs. To give the eggs a better chance of hatching a chick, keepers may swap a dummy egg for the real one and give it to a more successful pair to incubate.

Last year, the zoo’s first penguin chick, Opal, was the biological offspring of parents Juan and Rosalita – one of the egg-breaking pairs – and reared by another pair, first-time foster parents Luis and Calypso, who incubated her egg and fed and cared for her after she hatched.

“It was their first time fostering and they really knocked it out of the park,” said April Zimpel, the zoo’s bird manager.

This year’s star foster parents are Elmer and Lima. The two males paired up this past fall for the current breeding season, built a nest and defended their territory – so the penguin team decided to test their fostering capabilities.

 “It takes practice,” said Ted Fox, director, Rosamond Gifford Zoo. “Some pairs, when given a dummy egg, will sit on the nest but leave the egg to the side and not incubate it correctly, or they’ll fight for who is going to sit on it when,” said Fox. “That’s how we evaluate who will be good foster parents – and Elmer and Lima were exemplary in every aspect of egg care.”

Several other institutions have had good luck with same-sex pairs of penguins fostering eggs. Those reported in recent years include Electra and Viola, a female pair of Gentoo penguins at the Oceanogràfic Valencia aquarium in Spain; Skipper and Ping, a male pair of king penguins at the Berlin Zoo, and Eduardo and Rio, a male pair of Magellanic penguins at the San Francisco Zoo.

Fox said same-sex penguin pairs show that the idea of “family” is not species-specific and that in many cases, non-traditional families do a wonderful job of child-rearing.

“Elmer and Lima’s success at fostering is one more story that our zoo can share to help people of all ages and backgrounds relate to animals,” he said.

Humboldt penguins are native to the Humboldt current off the coast of Chile and Peru in South America. They are listed as Vulnerable, with the wild population declining due to habitat loss and climate change.

The Rosamond Gifford Zoo joined the Species Survival Plan for Humboldt penguins in 2005 with the opening of its Penguin Coast exhibit. The zoo defied all expectations by starting its colony with 18 birds from other zoos and aquariums in the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA) and producing chicks the very next year.

The zoo has since hatched more than 55 penguin chicks, many of whom have gone on to participate in the SSP at other AZA institutions.

Fun Fact: Humboldt penguin Elmer is so named because the egg he hatched from was accidentally damaged by his parents and the animal care team repaired it using Elmer’s glue!