- My name is Stephanie

and I'm a senior trainer here at the Georgia Aquarium.

I'm working with the African penguins.

Currently, we are in the middle

of nesting season for African penguin.

And we've got some really special things to show you today.

We're gonna start out by showing

you some veterinary daily checks

that we're doing with our youngest chicks,

that range in age from about three days old.

And then our oldest check is about 44 days old.

So why don't you guys come with me and we'll get started.

(buoyant music)

All right. now that we're back here

in the backside of the habitat

we're gonna get started with some of our daily health checks

with one of our veterinarians, Dr. Sarah.

This chick is about three days old.

We're looking for it to gain weight every day,

but in the first week of life

we really want it to double its body weight.

That's something that we can use to measure

to make sure that the parents are feeding it enough.

(penguin chick squealing)

Very good.

So, this is soliciting.

So, this is what a chick would do underneath

the parents to let them know,

"Hey, I'm hungry, You can feed me anytime."

I know.

Tell them.

You gotta tell them to feed you.

All right, so that's all we needed to do with this chick.

So, we're just gonna put him back with parents

and let them continue to do a great job.

So this is before and you can see it's much bigger.

It's older than the other ones.

(soft music)

769 grams.

Good job.

It's doing a great job gaining weight

underneath his foster parents out there.

Getting bigger by the day.

Right now, we're gonna go check on our older chicks.

So, once they reach about 21 days

they get a little bit more curious

and a little bit more exploratory

of their habitat out there.

So, we bring them back here to start their training process.

This is all really excellent behavior that we're seeing.

The fact that I've come into this space

and they're coming up to me seeking attention.

They are showing that we are a positive thing

in their environment,

which is awesome.

It's exactly what we're looking for.

We typically eat for about 30% of their body weight

for their diet for each day.

So, we do three or four feeds a day

and we, you know, kind of split it up

and make sure they're getting that good nutrition.

Since we don't know if they're males or females,

we also don't know anything really about them yet.

We haven't named them yet.

So they're going by their numbers.

So this nesting season

we've actually had eight penguin chicks hatch.

So the other three are still on the habitat

with their parents.

They're a little bit too young to be back here.

But these five have all graduated to this stage

in their training process.

And they'll start learning different behaviors;

maybe how to walk into it a tunnel,

how to walk onto a scale.

Allowing us to pick them up and look at their feet.

Different things like that,

that can help us take better care of them.

It's great starting early,

because they're super motivated.

They really want to eat a lot of food.

And so we can really capitalize on that

and get that training going as soon as possible.

Around November each year at the Georgia Aquarium,

we start to put out nesting material.

We happen to use a dried lavender.

The penguin seem to find it really reinforcing.

They go and collect the big mouthfuls of it

and take it back to their nests (indistinct)

and make nice nests with it.

And if they were happen to ingest it

they can regurgitate it pretty easily.

Once they make those nests,

if they lay eggs and they are viable,

which means they're developing into a chick.

Once that chick starts to hatch

we will monitor the progress of the chick

underneath the parents.

You might have heard me say foster parents

from time to time throughout this video.

And that's just because sometimes

they lay two eggs that are viable.

And it's a lot easier to raise one chick than two.

We've definitely utilized foster parents this year.

We've utilized them in the past.

And they did just as great a job

as if it was the biological mum and dad.

Throughout that incubation process we're checking the egg

to make sure it's developing properly.

About day 35, we start looking to see if the egg has pipped

which means the beak of the chick

has started to break through the shell.

So in their natural environment,

African penguins don't have a family unit.

So, once the chicks are old enough to leave the nest,

mum and dad don't have anything to do with them anymore.

They form their own little groups

and they won't have that bond with mum and dad anymore

once they aren't feeding them any longer.

It's really cool the way it works.

Once parents are done raising their chicks

in their natural environment,

they turn right into molting season.

And so to molt, you need to eat a bunch of fish

to get rid of all those old feathers

to get the new ones to grow in.

It's really important that at zoos and aquariums

that house African penguins,

that are participating in that SSP program

or the Species Survival Plan,

continue to have chicks

because their numbers are so bad

in their natural environment

that they are an endangered species.

Now, if their numbers ever continue to get even worse

it's possible that somebody might make a plan

to potentially re-release animals back out

into their natural environments.

Now, none of these chicks that you see here

would probably ever be candidates for that,

because they're so used to people now.

I mean, they find us reinforcing.

But that's not to say that down the road,

maybe they couldn't have chicks that were released.

Just to help repopulate in South Africa and Namibia.

Now there's nothing set yet for that kind of plan,

but it's something that we can think about

and prepare for the future if it ever does get that bad.

And so that's why keeping the genetics

as clean as possible is so important.

Thanks everybody for watching and learning more

about our African penguin chicks

here at the Georgia Aquarium.

And there is so much to pass to the rest of us.

(bright music)