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The new home of the penguins
Magellanic penguins and Inca terns have returned to the Oceanário.
The Southern Ocean is the new habitat for Magellanic penguins at the Lisbon Oceanário. After 10 months of reconstruction work, we can now see them up close, racing underwater and strolling on the beach.
With its usual clumsy steps, the penguin walks back and forth on a rock, right at the water’s edge. It looks at the large tank next to it, but its courage is slow to appear. There it stays, back and forth, without stopping. Around it, the other penguins sometimes swim, sometimes are rocked by the waves that wash up on the sand, sometimes hide in the holes in the rocks.
At Oceanário de Lisboa, since its inauguration in 1998, this is the first time that such a large reconstruction has been carried out in the animals’ habitats. For ten months, Magellanic penguins and Inca terns were hidden from visitors’ view, but now they can be seen up close in a larger space that recreates sub-Antarctic coastal areas, with rocks, waterfalls, ice, stalactites, and a swimming area with simulated tidal waves. The goal, explains Oceanário, was to “raise the standard of animal welfare and environmental diversification.”
Previously known as Antarctica, the area has also been given a new name following the nomenclature of the International Hydrographic Organization: Southern Ocean. Today, 29 Magellanic penguins live here, organized into a community, each with its own name, along with 12 Inca terns, which fly overhead, keeping an eye on what is happening below. For Xico, Sal, Zorrina, Frank and the other penguins, there is a whole new home to explore, from the most hidden corners where they can build nests to the bottom of the ocean, where they dare to dive.
To see them underwater, it is worth going down to the ground floor of the Oceanário and sticking close to the glass of the tank – at feeding time, they swim by at high speed, in entertaining games of chase, to steal fish from each other’s mouths, as if there were not enough to go around. There seems to be no boredom here. And the only pressure is from the three cold waterfalls, which give the environment the coolness of the Southern Ocean.
The aquarists assure us that the penguins were already missing visitors at Oceanário. The truth is that they all seem cheerfully calm… or almost all of them. But even that one, after several minutes of pacing back and forth, plucks up the courage and finally dives in, happy.
