This Humboldt Penguin chick hatched the 18th April to parents Lindor and Mars. This species of penguin are endangered and classed as Vulnerable on the IUCN red list. For this reason Peak Wildlife are asking for endangered names.
You can connect with Peak Wildlife on social media and comment in their posts with your name ideas:
In the last weeks of spring, a total of six Rockhopper penguin chicks have hatched. You can now see the offspring in the "kindergarten" of the Polarium. Twice a day, the young birds are fed with fish and their weight is constantly monitored. Each chick squeezes up to 20 small herring and sprats per day. "They already weigh around one and a half kilograms. Their weight gain is ensured by our keepers so that the young animals can develop healthily. The chicks are still wearing a dune dress that is not water-repellent. Therefore, their enclosure has no access to the water basin. Only when they have the first moult behind them, swimming attempts are dared. Then they come back to the group, because even in the wild they live together in large breeding colonies," reports Zoo Director Stephan Hering-Hagenbeck.
Zookeepers at ZSL London Zoo swoop in and hand-rear five adorable penguin chicks
Zookeepers at ZSL London Zoo have their hands full in the penguin nursery this month – feeding and caring for five hungry Humboldt penguin chicks, after their parents were unable to look after them.
Brookfield, Ill. —A month-old Humboldt penguin chick, who hatched at Brookfield Zoo on February 2, is growing by leaps and bounds. The chick is only the second successful offspring for parents—14-year-old Divot and 21-year-old Rosy—making its hatching extremely significant to the Humboldt penguin population in Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) accredited North American institutions.
Rose the Blue Penguin (so named for Betty White's iconic Golden Girls character) at Cincinnati Zoo had her first swim lessons with her care team! This great video is brought to you by Great American Insurance Group.
Oh—big yawn! Another endangered African penguin chick has hatched at Maryland Zoo in Baltimore’s Penguin Coast. This sweet chick brings our total to 10 hatchlings for the breeding season thus far. 🐧
There’s no name yet! We’ll have to wait for blood results first to determine the chick's sex.
Paradise Wildlife Park is excited to announce the birth of an endangered African Penguin chick and there’s no better reason to smile this Blue Monday as they couldn’t be any cuter!
On the morning of 20th December, our bird keepers arrived to discover the newest addition to our penguin colony snuggled under the feathers of their parents Albert and Akiki. The chick has grown strong and healthy since birth under the careful watchful eye of its parents and the bird-keeping team. With the vet coming in soon for the first weight check, we are sure it will be a healthy number for sure!
The four hatchlings tested the waters with their new feathers, important milestone before joining the colony on exhibit
CHICAGO — Shedd Aquarium’s four Magellanic penguin chicks have officially left the nest and reached important milestones before they join the full penguin colony in the Polar Play Zone and are viewable to the public. The chicks recently fledged their fluffy feathers for their juvenile waterproof feathers and had their first introduction to water for their first swim. While penguins don’t get airborne, they do fly through the water, flapping with strong solid wings.
In addition to their first swim, the penguin chicks have been reaching additional developmental milestones, including eating fish, socializing, and exploring new spaces around the aquarium, and more. The chicks are also starting to build relationships with the animal care team.
Regular check-ups with the aquarium’s animal care team show that birds are hitting all their growth targets and a test of biological samples taken from the chicks’ eggshells will help determine their sexes since penguins’ reproductive organs are internal. Once the sex of the birds is determined, the aquarium will share any potential naming plans for the birds and the expected timing for when guests can see the newest arrivals.
Although these four chicks may not be out in the exhibit yet, the public can plan a visit to the aquarium to see the rest of the penguin colony or attend a virtual or onsite penguin encounter to come face-to-face with the birds. The public can also support Shedd’s mission and dedication to top-quality animal care by symbolically adopting a penguin to receive a plush, photo of the animal and regular updates on the birds.
BACKGROUND: This spring, Magellanic penguins began creating nests and preparing for the breeding season after animal care experts shifted the light cycle and scattered nesting materials in the Polar Play Zone exhibit. This new chick arrived on Saturday, May 29, following hatchlings on Thursday, April 29, Wednesday, May 5, and Wednesday, May 12.
Chattanooga, Tenn. (July 27, 2021) – As any parent knows, kids tend to do whatever you least expect. In the case of an endangered Four-eyed Turtle hatchling at the Tennessee Aquarium, however, merely existing was — in itself — a huge surprise.
On July 11, a volunteer was tending an enclosure in a backup area of the River Journey building. This habitat was only supposed to house an endangered female Four-eyed Turtle (Sacalia quadriocellata), but the volunteer soon discovered that the adult turtle wasn’t alone. Perched atop a layer of vegetation was a tiny hatchling that, by all accounts, shouldn’t even have been there.
“The adult female hadn’t been with a male in over a year, so we did not check to see if she had laid this year,” says Bill Hughes, the Aquarium’s herpetology coordinator. “To say the least, finding an egg, let alone a hatchling, was unexpected.”
Hughes says females of some turtle species have been documented to store sperm until conditions favor fertilization. This adaptation may be behind the unexpected hatching, but at the moment, the tiny turtle’s origins remain a mystery.
The baby Four-eyed joins another that hatched on June 10 from an egg husbandry staff were aware of and had been monitoring. The first hatchling emerged from an egg laid on April 15. Both are eating and doing well.
Since 2007, the Aquarium has successfully hatched 47 Four-eyed Turtles, which are so named for the distinctive eye-like markings on the back of their heads. Found only in mountainous streams and ponds in Southeast Asian, this species has been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature since 2000, thanks to over-collection in the wild and habitat loss.
“These turtles fall under a Species Survival Plan that I manage,” says Hughes, who also oversees a program managing the closely related, critically endangered Beal’s Four-eyed Turtle (Sacalia bealei). “Increasing their population is a long-term goal, so every hatchling is a step further in the right direction.”
Visitors to the Aquarium can see adorable examples of Four-eyed and Beal’s Four-eyed Turtles in the hatchling nursery of River Journey’s Turtles of the World gallery.
But tiny turtles aren’t the only recent arrivals at the Aquarium.
On June 24, the Aquarium celebrated the arrival of a Gentoo Penguin chick in the Penguins’ Rock gallery. It began the herculean task of leaving its egg two days earlier on June 22, when animal care specialists first saw its beak and heard its squeaking vocalizations. This fuzzy newcomer is the offspring of Flower (mom) and Blue (dad), a newly minted pair of veteran parents.
During a routine veterinary checkup the day after it hatched, the chick weighed 132 grams — about 4.5 ounces. After a month of attentive care by its parents and close observation by Aquarium staff, the formerly tiny, peeping ball of fluff now weighs 2.4 kilograms (5.3 pounds), an increase of more than 1,800 percent. If a human child were to grow at the same rate, a newborn weighing seven pounds at birth would tip the scales at 127 pounds four weeks later.
Size isn’t the only thing that’s bigger about the chick, though, says Loribeth Lee, the Aquarium’s senior aviculturist.
“For the first two weeks, it was pretty mellow, just looking around and studying everything,” Lee says. “Once two weeks hit, though, it developed a strong personality and loves to yell and slap at anything that moves too close!”
At the moment, the chick is still being fed by its parents, but Aquarists plan to begin hand-feeding it solid food in the next two weeks. Visitors to the Aquarium can observe the chick in its nest, which is encircled by clear acrylic panels, for the next six to seven weeks, when it will be old enough to join the rest of the colony. Its gender will remain unknown, pending the results of a routine blood test in November.
To keep tabs on the Aquarium’s Gentoo and Macaroni Penguins, digital visitors can watch a live video feed of the Penguins’ Rock gallery at tnaqua.org/live/penguins-rock/.
Elsewhere in the Ocean Journey building, a trio of juvenile Long-spine Porcupinefish (Diodon holocanthus) are being raised in a culturing facility near the Aquarium’s Secret Reef exhibit.
Despite only being as large as a thumbnail, these two-month-old pufferfish are dead ringers for their round-bodied, spine-covered parents. Under the care of aquarists and a steady diet of brine shrimp, they’re gradually increasing in size like balloons inflating in slow motion.
Once large enough — likely this fall —they’ll be placed on display in the Aquarium’s new larval fish exhibit in the Ocean Journey building.
The fish are the offspring of five adults housed in an off-campus care facility. Eggs collected from this facility were taken to the Aquarium, which has been conducting pioneering work into raising marine fish in-house since early 2017. Eventually, the adults will be brought to Ocean Journey to join the bustling aquatic community of the Secret Reef exhibit.
Whatever their age, there’s no denying the charisma Long-spine Porcupinefish exude, says Senior Aquarist Kyle McPheeters.
“These are definitely one of the cutest fish we work with, especially as babies,” he says. “But even the adults have a really outgoing personality and a very expressive face.”
While winter school holidays plans across NSW have been thrown into chaos, a few Marine Keepers from Taronga Zoo Sydney have still taken to time to welcome and celebrate the month of June and spread some much-needed laughter and joy around the zoo. To mark the occasion, Taronga’s waddle of little penguins were treated to some very n-ice enrichment! Kindly donated by Sydney Fish Market, keepers created a mini winter wonderland within the little penguin's exhibit. As little penguins are found natively along the southern coastlines of Australia this isn’t something they would experience in the wild. For never actually seeing snow, keepers explained that the little penguins were quite brave, tapping their little flippers over the ice and investigating their new environment.