Same-sex penguin pairs raising chicks aren’t new—but another expectant couple made the headlines this week, so let’s take a look at just how many there are!
Two Gentoo penguins at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium in Australia, Sphen and Magic, “have developed a strong bond and become inseparable this breeding season,” the aquarium reported on its Instagram feed last Thursday. They were given an egg from another couple that had two, and “make a great team” caring for it. [Update, 10/26/2018: They’re now dads!]
Most readers here will also know of Silo and Roy, the two male chinstrap penguins at Central Park Zoo whose chick-raising adventures in 1999 were chronicled in the 2005 picture book And Tango Makes Three, by (human gay dads) Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell.
Other male parenting penguin pairs (or prospective penguin parents) include:
- Harry and Pepper of the San Francisco Zoo, who began nesting together in 2003 and raised a chick before being broken up by a female who went with Harry;
- A male pair at Polar Land in China who were trying to steal eggs to start a family back in 2008;
- Guido and Molly of the East London Aquarium in South Africa (2009);
- Z and Vielpunkt of Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany (2009);
- An unnamed pair of King penguins at Odense Zoo in Denmark (2012), who would try to “disturb the other pairs and steal their eggs” and “In brooding season … took to trying to incubate dead herring” before they were given an egg they successfully hatched;
- Jumbs and Kermit, a Humboldt penguin couple at the Wingham Wildlife Park in Kent, England (2014);
- Ronnie and Reggie of ZSL London Zoo, who adopted an egg abandoned by another couple (2015);
- A male penguin couple who recently “kidnapped” (“chicknapped?”) a chick at Denmark’s Odense Zoo, apparently because they thought the chick’s biological parents were neglecting it.
- [Updated, 7/5/2019: Eduardo and Rio of the San Francisco Zoo have hatched three eggs and raised the chicks together.]
Female penguin parent pairs are rarer, but Thelma and Louise of Auckland’s Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium made headlines for their family last year. (Suki and Chupchikoni of the Ramat Gan Safari park in Israel are another female pair but are not, to the best of my knowledge, parents.) [Update, 7/5/2019: Marama and Rocky, a female pair of Gentoo penguins at Sea Life London, have hatched their first adopted chick, reports the Independent.]
Not all of the pairs have stayed together. Even Silo and Roy have separated and each are now with female mates. And then there’s the sad story of Pedro and Buddy, a bonded male pair at the Toronto Zoo, who were forceably separated in order to breed with females. But as one animal expert told the New York Times, “”Bisexual’ would be a better term for animals…. They’re sometimes described as gay animals, but they really aren’t.” (I’ve made that mistake in some of my earlier coverage, and resolve not to do it again.)
Penguins aside, we’ve also seen Romeo and Juliet, a pair of female swans in the Boston Public Gardens who laid (unfertilized) eggs together, and flamingo dads Carlos and Fernando of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, England, who hatched an egg and raised a chick in 2007.
Interestingly, while none of the pairs above were, as I understand it, engaged in sexual behavior with each other (hey, we all know that parenthood takes time away from other things), British scientist George Murray Levick in 1915 wrote of the male Adélie penguin’s “depraved” behavior that included same-sex sexual acts, coercing females into sex, and sexual acts with dead females. As Douglas Russell, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum, explained to the Guardian, though, “The penguin is the most humanlike of all birds in its appearance and its behaviour is most often interpreted in anthropomorphic terms…. For this reason, Adélie behaviour, when it was observed for the first time in detail, seemed especially shocking.” Russell also noted, in explaining what Levick observed, “Adélies gather at their colonies in October to start to breed. They have only a few weeks to do that and young adults simply have no experience of how to behave.” Young adults with no clue about behavior? There’s a human parallel there as well—the difference being that it’s no excuse in humans. (Teach your kids about consent!) As we’ve come to learn, too, same-sex bonding is hardly “depraved,” and same-sex pairs, whether avian or human, seem to do just fine in raising their young.
Always a reader, too rarely a commenter, but had to break the silence to say: Brav@! Flapping my fin-wings together here in gratitude for a gloriously well-researched piece. :)
Thank you! Flapping my fin-wings back atcha!