Zoo Discovers Female Penguin is Actually a Gay Male
Zookeepers in England grew suspicious after the penguin they thought was female began displaying dominant behavior.
Zookeepers at the Birdland Park and Gardens in Bourton-on-the-Water, England, were shocked after the king penguin they had been hoping to use as part of a breeding initiative turned out not to be female.
The penguin formerly known as Maggie had come to the wildlife park in 2016 from Denmark in the hope that she would produce an egg.
Four years ago, when Maggie reached sexual maturity, she began displaying flirtatious behavior with a male named Frank. But Frank and Maggie were unsuccessful at producing an egg, despite being seen mating regularly over the years.
Alistair Keen, Birdland’s head keeper, told The Washington Post that the couple would make distinctive penguin noises and posturing.
“They do a low trumpeting call, which is basically them saying, ‘I’m free and I’m single. Who’s interested?’ And whoever’s interested then shouts back,” Keen said. “They’ll even check out their partners’ feet, as they incubate their egg on their feet.”
Keen recalled Birdland staff getting their expectations up because of behavior exhibited by the penguins, only to be disappointed.
Keen began to note that he had suspicions about Maggie’s sex as she grew taller than her female peers, and began displaying dominant characteristics in the birds’ mating ritual, which female penguins don’t do.
Maggie, taking on the more dominant role, began mating with other penguins, including another male named Spike. This behavior and the lack of an egg led keepers to conduct a DNA test, at which point they discovered Maggie was male.
“I wasn’t 100 percent surprised when I found out,” Keen said.
Keepers have since renamed Maggie as Magnus, a nod to the bird’s Scandinavian roots.
“We’ve told the breeding program, so I’m kind of hoping that gives them an excuse to give me another female,” Keen told the Post.
The confusion over the penguin’s gender was caused by the fact that male penguins lack an extruding sex organ, meaning that without a DNA test, it’s difficult to determine gender.
Penguins inseminate each other when an opposite-sex pair rub orifices known as cloacae together to transfer sperm, which is produced by males from internal testes.
That said, even knowing that Magnus is a male penguin, same-sex behavior is not at all unusual among penguins. Earlier this year, after Sphen — a male Gentoo penguin at Sea Life Sydney Aquarium in Australia — died, his longtime partner, Magic, began to sing, leading the entire penguin colony to erupt into a mournful song.
In 1998, at New York’s Central Park Zoo, Roy and Silo, a pair of chinstrap penguins, began performing mating rituals and one of them attempted to hatch a rock as if it were an egg. This inspired zoo keepers to give them an egg that a heterosexual pair of penguins could not hatch.
Roy and Silo incubated the egg and raised the chick that hatched from it, named Tango. The story is the basis for a children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, which conservatives in the U.S. have attempted to remove from libraries and book collections on the grounds that the story contains “inappropriate ” content for minors.
More recently, a male Humboldt penguin couple, Elmer and Lima, successfully incubated and raised a chick who hatched from an egg taken from a heterosexual couple that posed a danger to the egg.
Because Humboldt penguins have been classified as “vulnerable,” or at high risk of becoming extinct in the wild, it was important that the egg be given to a couple who could properly take care it and hatch it in order to increase the penguin population.
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