penguin lust lives

I grew up reading Bloom County and always loved Opus and the penguin lust storyline. Imagine my joy at discovering that there's some real penguin lust afoot. Zurita is a homewrecking penguin. Her tale includes catfights, seduction, and reaping the wild wind.

The sordid tale of a desperate penguin: This widow stole her neighbors' husbands, fell into the flippers of a younger male, and now is winging it as a single mom.

First she thoroughly breached all sense of propriety among her penguin peers by stealing spouses, brawling with another female and seducing an uninitiated adolescent male.

Now, separated from the rest of the Brookfield Zoo colony, Zurita has likely become the world's first successful single-parent penguin, raising a chick fathered by a much younger companion who can't be bothered to help out ...

Zurita began looking for love in the wrong places, by soliciting males already spoken for.

When she approached a male named Popero, his mate, Bumblebee, confronted Zurita in a violent tussle.

Penguins have sharp beaks and a strong bite, and the two females went after each other's faces, trying to cut each other and pounding away with their powerful wing flippers ...

"Penguins are very social animals, so we couldn't leave Zurita alone," McGill said. Instead, they brought in a year-old male, Gazpacho, to keep her company ...

As she began incubation, she at times left the eggs, Broniewicz said, as though inviting Gazpacho to take a turn sitting on them. Whenever she stood up, however, he expressed interest only in making whoopee.

"He liked the first part of making babies but was far less interested in the second part of tending to the eggs and the hatched chicks," McGill said.

Zurita ended up sitting on the eggs for the entire 42-day incubation, fed by the keepers and rising only momentarily to stretch and get a drink of water.

Keepers knew Zurita could not physically care for two hatched chicks alone, raising the specter that neither would survive. So they removed the second egg.

Sure enough, when the remaining egg hatched, Gazpacho again ignored his duty.

"He is the youngest male on record in any zoo anywhere to have successfully fertilized an egg," Broniewicz said, "but he is just too immature to take up real parenting duties.

"He had free access to Zurita and the chick, but most of the time he wanted to be off playing with his friends, the other juveniles in the colony," stopping off at the nest only to see if Zurita was in a mating mood.

Via Gnostical Turpitude