“Tango gets a fish!”
Mika Yoshida, aviculturist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, calls out
each time a Magellanic
penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus)
takes a small fish from her hand. Tango—who came from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—tips
his head back and the slippery, three-inch capelin slides down his gullet. Mika’s
assistant, Don, puts a check next to that penguin’s name on a chart. It’s their
way of ensuring that each bird is getting enough to eat, and their daily
vitamins.
Mika and her staff repeat these hand-feeding sessions four
times per day in the Aquarium’s special exhibition, Hot
Pink Flamingos: Stories of Hope in a Changing Sea. The exhibit is home to 10
Magellanic penguins: six are rescued birds from the Niteroi Zoo in Rio, and four
others are on loan from the San Francisco Zoo.
“Pingo gets a fish!”
Tango, Dulce and
Giselda were among the 700 birds brought to the Niteroi Zoo to be nursed back
to health in 2008. Scientists believe that climate
variations altered ocean currents and where penguins could find food,
requiring them to travel farther from shore. There, younger and
inexperienced birds were taken by strong currents and ended up in Brazil,
thousands of miles away from their home.
In addition to being
exhausted, about 200 penguins were coated with oil. Other exhibit birds—Pingo, Cristiano and
Rio—were stranded in 2009.
While the Hot Pink Flamingos exhibit was still in its
planning stages, Guest Experience Opportunities Supervisor Simone Jones heard
about the stranded birds. Fluent in Portuguese (the native language of Brazil),
she helped the husbandry staff conduct exhaustive long-distance negotiations to bring the six penguins
stateside.
Interestingly, the Rio birds are more accustomed to being
handled than the four captive-born birds from the San Francisco Zoo, who are
named Noodles, Patsy, Shim and Whatever. (No, we’re not playing “Who’s on First?”
She really is named Whatever.) Mika
attributes this to the fact that they had almost constant human interaction
during their rehabilitation.
“Noodles gets a fish!”
The catchy penguin names aren’t just for the benefit of our
Aquarists. Magellanic penguins, like the blackfooted
penguins in our Splash
Zone exhibit, are capable of learning their names and responding to simple
instructions. This can be handy at feeding time and during health checks or
moves.
Like many animals at the Aquarium, Magellanic penguins can
also be “target trained.” Mika places a stick with a small colored buoy on the
end in the water as a signal for a penguin to come over for a tasty snack. With
time, the penguins may even learn to “porpoise” on cue, bobbing up and down in
the water when a target is placed in the water. All these “educational
enrichments” provide variety and help keep the birds stimulated and happy.
“Patsy gets a fish!”
There’s another reason for logging how much each penguin
eats: a particularly ravenous bird might be getting ready to “molt”: the annual
process of losing feathers and then growing a new coat. During this time they can
gain 50 percent of their body weight. Then, once they’ve molted, they stop
eating, and live off the added fat stores until their new coat grows back (two
to four weeks).
Mika says that Magellanics also have some endearing traits.
“Toward the end of the day, if they get sleepy, they’ll swim in their sleep in
the water or on land,” she says. “It’s fun to watch—like a dog running in its
sleep.
“They’re also super curious and will come to the window to
check out visitors or look at toys that children are holding.”
Overall, says Mika, “They’re happy animals. They seem very
calm and content.”
Learn more about
Magellanic penguin conservation at Penguin
Sentinels.
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