Watch: Aussie Same-Sex Penguin Couple Renew Commitment
A same-sex gentoo penguin couple named Klaus and Jones might be good candidates for foster parenting a chick, keepers at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium said.
One of those keepers, Emily Thornton, recounted in a YouTube video posted by the aquarium that when the couple first got together four years ago, "they started building their nest in the wrong area," reported the NY Daily News, "but this year, for the first time they've actually put it in the nesting platform area, which is really exciting."
In the video, Thornton explains the mating ritual the gentoo penguins go through, which includes a male penguin presenting a rock to a prospective mate "kind of like a diamond ring." The males gather rocks to use in the construction of a nest.
Aquarium staffers hope that the devoted couple "one day might actually be foster parents," Thornton went on to say, adding that though the "same-sex male couple can't have their own eggs, we do actually provide Klaus and Jones with a dummy egg" so that the couple can "practice being dads" before being provided with a real egg.
Mixed-gender penguin couples typically have only one egg per mating season, but when they have two eggs, the second egg can be too much to look after. In other cases, heterosexual penguin couples simply neglect or abandon their eggs. That's where same-sex couples enter the picture as foster parents. Such couples, keeper Tanish Davis said, make for "doting parents."
The Daily News provided a short rundown of headline-making same-sex penguin couples from around the globe. There's Electra and Viola at the Oceanogràfic Valencia aquarium in Spain, Thelma and Louise at Kelly Tarlton's Sea Life Aquarium in New Zealand, and "Sphen and Magic, a male couple who became the loving parents of an egg laid by a negligent heterosexual couple at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium in Australia," the Daily News said.
The article called back to perhaps the most famous same-sex penguin couple of all, "Roy and Silo, a couple of male chinstrap penguins from New York City's Central Park Zoo, who were together for six years" and fostered an abandoned egg that hatched a chick named Tango. The story was told in the 2005 children's book "And Tango Makes Three," a perennial favorite that has also repeatedly been challenged by anti-LGBTQ+ activists seeking its removal from libraries.
Watch Thornton's comments below.