Zoo officials say seven Humboldt penguins were found dead in the Penguin Plunge on Thursday morning and have determined that they all drowned.
“We came into work this morning. Our zoo keeper for penguins went up to the penguin building, went in to work as normal and was quite shocked to find that we had a few dead penguins in the penguin pool. So she went to investigate what was going on and actually found that there were seven birds that had died,” said Jamie Dorgan, Director of Animal Care, Calgary Zoo.
The zoo is doing renovations on the penguin area and 22 Humboldts were moved into the holding rooms just two days ago with access to a pool of water overnight.
“All of our penguins were moved to a variety of holding rooms. When we built Penguin Plunge we built a bunch of holding rooms that were specific to penguins in the back areas so that we could have birds in there when we had them come in for quarantine or if we have sick birds or injured birds, they have a space to go where they can be separate and looked after. We’re currently doing some work in the building out front so we took all the birds and put them in the holding rooms on Monday, so they’ve been back there since Monday,” said Dorgan.
Dorgan says all of the penguins have been in the holding rooms before and that the group that died were all being kept in the same room.
“Some event caused this mass mortality and it would have been some event that happened in that room, we just don’t know what that is,” he said. “Based on what we’re seeing, we’re very sure they drowned, it’s just whether there were other contributing factors that may have led to that.”
The penguins were between six months and seven years of age and vets have already conducted necropsies on the birds.
“Right now it really just seems like something would have set this group of penguins off, they’re a very social species, you know, if one or two birds were in a bit of a panic, everybody could have just got in the mix and perhaps they were all getting worked up in the pool and something would have occurred that way, but really we’re speculating at this point,” said Dorgan. “We don’t know why, in this case, they would have inhaled a bunch of water and for whatever reason drowned.”
There are still 15 Humboldt penguins at the facility and officials have launched an investigation.
“Very surprising to find that they had drowned. It’s not something we ever would expect would happen so we’re currently just investigating to see if we can figure out what exactly happened,” said Dorgan.
Zoo officials say they have not seen any signs of stress in the remaining birds and that the penguins will not have access to the pool until they have a better idea of what happened.
