Call it a winner.
SeaWorld San Diego recently welcomed an emperor penguin chick into its family — marking the first hatch of the endangered species in the Western Hemisphere in nearly 13 years.
“This is the most exciting thing we’ll do all year, potentially all decade,” Justin Brackett, SeaWorld’s curator of birds, said Wednesday.
The unnamed female nestling was born last month and has made great progress in health despite a difficult hatching experience.
Staff detected movement and sounds coming from the egg on September 7, but realized she had not emerged from the casing.
A heartbreaking video shared by SeaWorld shows the young hatchling struggling and failing to break free from the shell, only making it through the inner membrane.
The first emperor penguin hatched in the Western Hemisphere in nearly 13 years. Facebook/SeaWorld San Diego
The SeaWorld team initially drilled a hole in the egg, but eventually had to break it completely out of the shell after five days when it became clear that the hatchlings could not do it on their own.
The team later determined the chick had a beak defect that prevented it from hatching, Brackett said.
Despite the hiccups, the fry has been making perfect progress and is gaining a healthy rate of 5%-10% of its body weight each day — likely a result of the steady diet of fish and “fish shakes” it eats.
The unnamed female nestling was born last month and has made great progress in health despite a difficult hatching experience. Facebook/SeaWorld San Diego
While the new emperor penguin chick will make an adorable addition to the SeaWorld family, its birth marks a major advance for the species, which is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act due to the loss of Antarctic sea ice and rising sea levels caused by climate change.
Decreasing ice sheets have caused emperor penguin populations to plummet – the Antarctic natives rely on sea ice as their habitat to breed, raise chicks and molt, and newly hatched chicks lack the waterproof feathers needed to swim or survive in the ocean.
“Disappearing sea ice is becoming more frequent as our planet continues to warm and is having a devastating effect on penguin populations,” said Katie Propp, Chief Operating Officer at Penguins International, in a statement.
Staff detected movement and sounds coming from the egg on Sept. 7, but realized he had not emerged from the shell.Facebook/SeaWorld San Diego A video shared by SeaWorld shows the young hatchling struggling and failing to break free from the shell, but only making it through the inner membrane. Facebook/SeaWorld San Diego
Unlike other species that produce several eggs a year, the female emperor only lays one egg a year.
Although other male and female penguins share incubation duties, female emperors usually return to the sea to feed after laying eggs, leaving males to incubate the eggs for more than two months when they are not feeding. They usually mate for life, says the World Wildlife Fund.
But because the mother did not transfer the egg to the father, SeaWorld staff took the egg into their custody.
Now the zoo is asking the public to help name the bird, putting three candidate names up for a vote: Pearl, Pandora and Astrid.
With Postal wire
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
