First she breached all sense of propriety among her penguin peers by stealing spouses, brawling with another female and seducing an uninitiated adolescent male.
Now, separated from the Brookfield Zoo colony, Zurita has likely become the world’s first successful single-parent penguin, raising a chick fathered by a much younger companion who won’t help out.
Her soap-opera story has delighted zookeepers who believe that in watching Zurita they have gleaned important insights into improving the husbandry and genetic diversity of captive Humboldt penguins.
Hatched in 1990 in the Vancouver Zoo, Zurita’s reputation was intact when she came to Brookfield at age 6.
The zoo’s bird curator, Patty McGill–also coordinator of the Humboldt penguin species survival plan for North America–decided that Zorro, a Brookfield male penguin, was a good genetic match for her.
They were destined for a long period of domestic bliss, as penguins mate for life in a 50-50 partnership.
“Female penguins remain faithful to their mates throughout their lives,” said Darlene Broniewicz, a senior keeper at the zoo’s Living Coast exhibit. “Male penguins cheat and go off with unattached females sometimes, but they always return to their mates and their nests.”
That was Zurita and Zorro’s pattern, but when Zorro died of kidney failure in 2000, they had never produced a fertile egg. With no available male in the colony, Zurita began looking for love in the wrong places, by soliciting males already spoken for.
One ended up giving her a fertile egg, but when keepers discovered the male was Zurita’s cousin, they took the egg away to avoid the dangers of inbreeding. Still, Zurita continued to look for male conquests.
“She continued to solicit males from established pairs,” Broniewicz said.
When she approached a male named Popero, his mate, Bumblebee, confronted Zurita in a violent tussle. To end the mayhem, Zurita was put in a room of her own.
“Penguins are very social animals, so we couldn’t leave Zurita alone,” McGill said. Instead, they brought in a 1-year-old male, Gazpacho, to keep her company.
Male penguins aren’t thought to be capable of fertilizing an egg until they are about 3, so nobody expected Gazpacho to be able to fertilize her eggs. But late in November, when Gazpacho was just 15 months old, Zurita suddenly stopped eating, a pretty good sign that a fertile egg was on the way.
The keepers provided a pile of stones for Gazpacho to take to Zurita. He ignored the rocks, so Zurita gathered them herself and fashioned a nest, where she laid two eggs.
As she began incubation, she at times left the eggs, Broniewicz said, as though inviting Gazpacho to take a turn sitting on them. Whenever she stood up, however, he expressed interest only in making whoopee.
“He liked the first part of making babies but was far less interested in the second part of tending to the eggs and the hatched chicks,” McGill said.
Zurita ended up sitting on the eggs for the entire 42-day incubation. Keepers knew Zurita could not physically care for two hatched chicks alone so they removed one.
Sure enough, when the remaining egg hatched, Gazpacho again ignored his duty.
“He is just too immature to take up real parenting duties,” Broniewicz said. “… Most of the time he wanted to be off playing with his friends, the other juveniles …”
Zurita’s still unnamed chick turned 100 days old Tuesday. Keepers will soon put her and Zurita back with the colony, giving the chick access for the first time to a big,
20-foot pool.
“It will be fun watching her go into the big pool the first time. She’s never seen a fish before,” said Broniewicz, noting that the 20-foot-deep pool is well stocked.
Once she experiences the deep pool, dependency on Zurita will be gone. She will be on her own, playing with her juvenile father and his pals, Ceviche, Salsa and Margarita.
Life also should calm down for Zurita soon, as McGill has found her a permanent home at the Milwaukee County Zoo, where a single male penguin awaits her. Within the next couple of months, she should be back to a life of marital bliss.
———-
Edited by Curt Wagner (cwwagner@tribune.com) and Martin Gee (mtgee@tribune.com)
