Penguin Feeding Time

Feeding a penguin is an interesting experience. We fed several little blue penguins at New Zealand’s National Aquarium. While there, we went through a tunnel made of glass with fish swimming all around and saw lots of fun sea creatures too! New Zealand’s National Aquarium has many great experiences and houses some very interesting animals.

The aquarium was admittedly smaller than some we have visited, but it made up for it by having ocean animals AND kiwi birds!

We started our day at a fish that is called a pacu, similar to a piranha but gets a lot bigger and is an herbivore. Next we moved on to some smaller fish, namely clownfish and blue tang, more commonly known as Nemo and Dory. We passed a large, bored looking, hawksbill turtle and stopped for a minute to commiserate with it over its admittedly small living space. Once we got to the seahorses we stopped for a while and watched as one out of three of them put on a show! It swam all over before finally setting down and curling around a piece of seaweed and a moment later started out again, unable to get comfy! Right opposite to the seahorses were huge crayfish, that is what New Zealand calls their spiny lobster. We didn’t stay too long looking at them though, we moved on to kiwis! Now, I know that kiwi birds are not exactly an aquatic animal but it’s New Zealand. What animal related thing open to visitors could be complete without them? There were two kiwis and photography was, surprisingly, allowed as long as there was no flash. Most of the other kiwi places we have been to have forbidden photography all together.

On to my favorite part of the regular aquarium! In the aquarium there was a tunnel, surrounding that tunnel were a lot of fish and even more gallons of water. Walking through the tunnel was awesome! The first fish tried to find was a fish that Jack has been dying to see. It has these six weird legs that turn into fins and look really pretty when swimming but look really odd when they are just hanging out on the bottom. The stingrays were a major highlight as well, they kept swimming over us which gave a great view of their mouths which we usually don’t get to see. However, there was a stingray that just sat on the bottom in the same place with its tail in the air in what couldn’t have been a comfortable position.

Once we got out of the tunnel we checked the time and realized it was almost time for our special experience! Penguin feeding! The penguins receive a diet of small fish frozen and imported from Asia so that they are not contributing to overfishing the wild penguin’s food source. They do not get all of the vitamins they need from these fish alone, so they each get an extra fish stuffed with supplemental vitamins to ensure they remain healthy. All of the penguins that have a permanent home at the aquarium are unable to return to the wild for various reasons. The aquarium has a program to help and return injured penguins to the wild and when they find a penguin unable to, they introduce it to their colony. The aquarium does not introduce the injured penguins that are going to be sent back to the wild to the permanent aquarium colony, because of risk of disease. They get a separate room to recover. We got to see the room but no penguins were currently in residence. When we entered the colony of the permanently homed penguins, we sat down at benches and took turns handing the fish to the penguins. The main direction was for the fish to be fed head first to facilitate the ease of swallowing. It was fun to watch the fish being given to the hungry penguins however when it was my turn I got a bit nervous because every time I gave a penguin a fish its beak would get just a bit closer to my hand. We were assured the birds don’t bite visitors but I was still a little worried. The penguins also had varying levels of hunger, some of them would try and steal each others food, and some of them never even came up to us for a snack. The ones that stole others food were the most entertaining to watch, they would wait until we were about to give out a fish and then dart in and steal it! We all felt rather watched because we were, there was a penguin talk happening at the same time as the feeding, so lots of eyes.

It was a great trip to the aquarium and I will never forget the feel of the little beaks against my fingers.