Two female penguins from an aquarium in Valencia, Spain, became parents after hatching someone else’s fertilized egg. This case is reported by the Daily Mail.
According to the publication of the bird Keeper Carlos Barros, employees noticed that the penguins Electra and viola began to show typical behavior for penguins before breeding. In particular, they began to build their own nest of stones. Then the employees put a fertilized egg taken from another couple in this nest. The birds carefully hatched it, and soon it hatched a baby. It is noted that such a case in the aquarium of Valencia occurred for the first time in its history, and Electra and viola were the only same-sex couple in it.
Earlier it became known that four same-sex pairs of penguins live in the aquarium of the Irish city of Dingle. Eight of the 14 penguins have partners of the same sex, including four males and four females. One of the pairs, consisting of two females, has a baby penguin, which they raise together.
King penguins often exhibit homosexual behavior in captivity. The most famous same-sex pair of penguins were Roy and Silo from new York’s Central Park. The birds lived together for six years and raised a chick named tango. In 2005, Silo left the swarm for a female named scrappy. In 2010, a study published in the journal Ethology suggested that king penguins only form homosexual couples when they cannot find a partner of the other sex.