Two gay African penguins will be reunited after mating season, the Toronto Zoo says, adding that if their genes weren’t critical to continuing the endangered species they wouldn’t bother separating them. Several, including a zoologist-to-be and New Civil Rights Movement reader, note that artificial insemination is neither practical nor reliable for penguins.
READ:Â Gay Penguins Pedro and Buddy To Be Separated, Forced To Mate With Females
The National Post explains:
Pedro, 10, and Buddy, 20, were brought to the Toronto Zoo this year from Pittsburgh’s National Aviary to “pair-bond†with a couple of eligible females. Instead, the pair bonded with each other. Zookeepers now report seeing the pair snuggling, calling to each other and displaying courtship behaviour.
This week, the Toronto Zoo says it will be forced isolate the pair.
“The two girls have been following them; we just have to get the boys interested in looking at them,†said Tom Mason, curator of birds and invertebrates at the Toronto Zoo.
With Pedro and Buddy’s species on the cusp of extinction, Mr. Mason insists that the Toronto Zoo cannot afford to let a season go by without passing on the pair’s genes. “If [Pedro and Buddy] weren’t genetically important, then we’d let them do their thing,†Mr. Mason said.
In the 1990s, an estimated 225,000 African penguins lived in the wild. Nowadays the number is closer to 60,000 — and dropping fast. The cause, biologists suspect, is changing ocean currents that are driving food sources further and further away from penguin breeding grounds on the African coast. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has estimated that wild stocks of African penguins could be completely wiped out before the end of the century.
“We have to keep an eye on the population all the time, because if we let things slide we could lose the population forever,†Mr. Mason said.
As a result, the sexual partners of almost all captive African penguins are carefully mapped out by researchers at Chicago’s Population Management Center. There, penguins are paired, split up and even moved to different zoos purely on the basis of maximizing genetic diversity.
At the New England Aquarium, for instance, lovers are routinely split up and paired with other partners not because of orientation, but because they are too closely related, says Tony LaCasse, spokesperson for the New England Aquarium. “We joke that our staff are penguin yentas,†says Mr. LaCasse.
This story really touched our hearts, and we did some research.
Via Wikipedia:
Of the 1.5-million African Penguin population estimated in 1910, only some 10% remained at the end of the 20th-century. African penguin populations, which breed in Namibia and South Africa, have declined by 95 percent since preindustrial times.
Commercial fisheries have forced these penguins to search for prey farther off shore, as well as making them eat less nutritious prey, since their preferred prey has become scarce. Global climate change is also affecting these penguin’s prey abundance.
As recently as the mid-twentieth century, penguin eggs were considered a delicacy and were still being collected for sale. Unfortunately, the practice was to smash eggs found a few days prior to gathering, to ensure that only fresh ones were sold. This added to the drastic decline of the penguin population around the Cape coast, a decline which was hastened by the removal of guano from islands for use as fertilizer, eliminating the burrowing material used by penguins. Penguins remain susceptible to pollution of their habitat by petrochemicals from spills, shipwrecks and cleaning of tankers while at sea.
If you want to help penguins survive, you can “adopt” an African penguin for about $50, or help keep one alive for about $40.
Contact the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) or the Dyer Island Conservation Trust.