New York Zoo's Male Penguin Pair Becomes Foster Parents to Humboldt Penguin Chick

A recently hatched Humboldt penguin chick is being taken care of by two male Humboldt penguins who adopted its egg during breeding season. The "proud" foster parents, named Elmer and Lima, have been tending to and raising the baby chick by feeding it and keeping it warm since it hatched.

Tha happy family are now at the care of Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse. The New York Zoo had been working on boosting the dwindling population of Humboldt penguins for years, found off the coast of Chile and Peru in South America and listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

According to the Washington Post, the same-sex foster parents are "doing a great job" at their role.

Elmer and Lima's same-sex fostering journey

"We have some very exciting news! The first chick to be fostered by a pair of same-sex penguins at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo hatched on January 1," the zoo posted on Twitter.

According to authorities, the zoo had "a history of inadvertently breaking their fertilized eggs," which is why they rely on foster parents to incubate eggs in the past.

"It was their first time fostering and they really knocked it out of the park," the zoo's bird manager, April Zimpel, said in the zoo's website. Elmer and Lima were paired up this past fall for the current breeding season, built a nest and defended their territory -- so the penguin team decided to test their fostering capabilities, according to the zoo.

Zoo Director Ted Fox said not all penguin pairs are good at incubating eggs - "It takes practice."

"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," he said. "That's how we evaluate who will be good foster parents -- and Elmer and Lima were exemplary in every aspect of egg care."

"Elmer and Lima's success is one more story that our zoo can share to help people of all ages and backgrounds relate to animals," Fox said.

Same-sex pairs fostering eggs

While the same-sex pairs fostering eggs is first for the zoo, this concept is not entirely new. In fact, other institutions around the globe have seen positive results with this method.

Penguin parents or couples are nurturing in nature. They love to nestle eggs to protect it from cold temperatures and dangers with a fold of skin described by experts as a "fleecy fold of belly plumage."

Those reported in recent years include Electra and Viola, a female pair of Gentoo penguins at the Oceanogràfic Valencia aquarium in Spain; Skipper and Ping, a male pair of king penguins at the Berlin Zoo, and Eduardo and Rio, a male pair of Magellanic penguins at the San Francisco Zoo.

He notes that same-sex penguin pairs show that the idea of "family" is not species specific and that in many cases, non-traditional families do a wonderful job of child-rearing.