Same-Sex Penguins Bonded Naturally And Defended Their Nest, Then Proved To Be Good Parents

SYRACUSE, NY — Two same-sex penguins at an Upstate New York zoo are shifting paradigms surrounding family by showing they aren’t species-specific and that “non-traditional families do a wonderful job of child-rearing.”

Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse said males Elmer and Lima, two of the 28 birds in its internationally acclaimed Humboldt penguin breeding program, took turns incubating an artificially inseminated egg, which hatched Jan. 1, and have been feeding and caring for it ever since.

Elmer and Lima, the first same-sex parenting pair at the zoo, paired up naturally this fall, built a nest and defended their territory. Not all penguins are good at incubating eggs, but the zoo penguin team decided to test them out as foster parents.

“It takes practice,” zoo director Ted Fox said in a news release. “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.

“That’s how we evaluate who will be good foster parents — and Elmer and Lima were exemplary in every aspect of egg care.”

The zoo has relied on opposite-sex foster parents in the past to care for eggs from two bonded breeding pairs with a history of kicking and inadvertently breaking their fertilized eggs, the zoo said.

In fact, Elmer got his name because the egg he was hatched from was accidentally damaged by his egg-kicking parents and it was patched up with Elmer’s Glue.

“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," the zoo said.

One of the egg-breaking pairs, Juan and Rosalita, are the biological parents of Opal, the first penguin chick born at the zoo, but she was reared by first-time foster parents Luis and Calypso, who incubated her egg and fed and cared for Opal after she hatched.

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

Elmer and Lima got their chance to try out as parents two days before Christmas when the penguin team discovered an egg laid by Poquita and her mate, Vente, had a viable embryo inside.

They took excellent care of the egg before it hatched, taking turns incubating it, and they have been brooding — that is, warming — and feeding the chick since, Fox said.

The zoo is Syracuse isn’t the first with same-sex pairs of penguins who foster eggs. Others are zoos in Spain, Berlin and San Francisco.

Fox said the stories about same-sex pairs of penguins "is one more story that our zoo can share to help people of all ages and backgrounds relate to animals.”

Humboldt penguins, which are native to the Humboldt current off the Pacific coast of Chile and Peru, are classified as vulnerable due to threats from habitat loss and climate change.

As a member of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, Rosamond Gifford Zoo joined the Humboldt penguin Species Survival Plan when it opened its Penguin Coast exhibit in 2015 with 18 birds, some of which produce chicks the very next year.

In the years since, 55 penguin chicks have been hatched, many of them placed in zoos around the country or selected for participation in the SSP.