Sea World Hatches Up Some History With Penguin Birth

Sea World aviculturists announced Thursday that the world’s first-ever captive-bred chinstrap penguin was hatched late last month and is faring well.

Officials said the bird, now 5 ounces, hatched from an artificially incubated egg Nov. 29. For the next three months, it will live in a behind-the-scenes laboratory, relying on its human surrogate parents for food. By late February, the history-making bird will likely join the park’s 52-member chinstrap colony.

“The importance of this chick in zoological terms is hard to overstate,” said Burke Stuchlik, a senior aviculturist at the park. “We are extremely proud of this little guy.”

Stuchlik noted, however, that the sex of the new chinstrap is as yet undetermined.

Many penguin species lay a pair of eggs to increase the likelihood that one chick will survive. Sea World keepers often remove one of the eggs for artificial incubation and hand-rearing so the parent birds can focus attention on the other.

This is a record year at Sea World’s “Penguin Encounter,” where the park’s five species of smaller penguins have laid more than 120 eggs. Keepers are already raising nine chicks of three species, and they expect a baby boom before year’s end.