Newborn Humboldt penguin chick dies in Mumbai zoo
MUMBAI: Barely a week after the birth of India’s first Humboldt penguin baby spread cheer among the staff and visitors of Mumbai’s Byculla zoo, the chick has succumbed to birth defects. The chick died on Wednesday night, exactly a week after the egg hatched last week on Independence Day.
The chick was born to one of the seven Humboldt penguins brought to the zoo from South Korea in 2016.
According to the postmortem examination conducted by a team of professors from Bombay Veterinary College on Thursday, newborn anomalies like yolk sac retention and liver dysfunction were major causes of the death.
“Both parents were taking good care of the chick and its development was proper. All efforts were made by the team (looking after the chick) but it was found dead on August 22 during night hours,” read a statement by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), which manages the Byculla zoo.
The gender of the chick was unknown and BMC was planning to conduct a DNA test to find that out.
Quoting a scientific paper on ‘Artificial incubation and hand rearing of Humboldt penguins’, the BMC statement mentioned a 30-35% mortality rate for chicks that were less than 30 days old, saying the first three months were crucial for survival of the penguin chick.
According to zoo officials, the mortality rate for penguin eggs and chicks was high at 60% due to reasons such as infertility of egg, mal-positioning of the chick inside the egg, failure to hatch, chick deformity, inability of parents to feed the chick, yolk sac retention and residual albumin among others.
BMC has been facing flak from animal activists for importing eight Humboldt penguins — three males and five females — from Seoul on July 26 2016, with many reasoning that Mumbai was not a natural habitat for them.
One of the penguins died of bacterial infection the same October.
The Humboldt penguins have a life span of about 25 years.
“The penguin chick has high mortality rate but BMC should (also) have been more careful. This is not their natural habitat. They should not have been brought to India in the first place,” said Sunish Sumbramaniam Kunju, secretary of Plant & Animals Welfare Society (PAWS), an NGO.