Catalogue of Penguins in Captivity Worldwide

Seaworld San Diego 100% has a large breeding colony of Humboldt penguins. They are housed off display with a couple of brandts cormorants and a skua in the south west part of the park.

 

Come to think of it, why would you keep a skua with a breeding colony of penguins? Doesn't seem like that would be a very good idea...

 

Time to update the captive status of the Australian little penguin,

 

Nanjing Underwater World currently has three on show. They didn't look full sized to me. Abysmal exhibit as well.

 

Weymouth Sea Life in England now has 25 Australian Little Blue Penguins

Thanks for putting this fantastic list together! Very useful and informative and it works as the unofficial first "ZooChat Photographic Guide" for birds

Where did you hear that the US population of King Penguin is all mixed? I've almost always seen birds listed a nominate (which is what I have Edinburgh's down as also). Also when did Little Blues get split?

Oh and yes the US population of rockhoppers is the nominate.

I never really thought of Chinstrap and Magellanic as being on the rarer side, as I've seen them regularly at CPZ and Bronx for years. I suppose I'm quite lucky on the penguin front as the WCS collections hold 8 out of the 12 species between them!

Fun fact: I have seen every species of penguin in the US bar Northern Rockhopper so far this year, including both subspecies of Gentoo. I should remedy this before the year is out, though not at Moody Gardens.

~Thylo

 

That's true, wonder if that series will be soon in coming!

It was a while ago, though as I understand it, at least one of the proposed species is debated.

I wouldn't have thought Magellanic was rare either, they're the species I've seen the most.

Impressive Thylo!

 

Nagoya port doesn't seems to have king penguin(At least not on JAZA and on my visit). It seems to be the only zoo with all four Antarctica penguin though.

I also think some of the "Emperor" in China is King, or vice versa. I mean, what is the reason of keeping two similar species?

 

Sorry, this is Emperor Penguins, for those not following the thread closely.

 

Don't wait for me There are still 20 bovid splits to be discussed, a good number of those is relatively straightforward, but especially the genus Ovis is complicated. After the bovids it will speed up considerably, though there still is a Mazama mess and complex stories for Red deer, Sika and Wild boar....

 

How about Magellanic, Humboldt, and African? Yes, they all may look similar and the average zoo visitor may not be able to tell the difference, but the three do not overlap much in the wild. IUCN lists African as endangered, Humboldt as vulnerable, and Magellanic as near threatened. These species all provide an opportunity for promoting conservation, and the large captive populations help safeguard against extinction.
The same applies for Jaguar/Leopard, White/Black Rhino, Hyacinth/Lear's Macaw, Sumatran/Bornean Orangutan, Gila Monster/Mexican Beaded Lizard, etc... Both similar species are equally important. Focusing on one species means a high chance of losing the other in captivity, look at how the vast majority of brown bears in the US are Grizzlies, and Amur Leopards predominate with only rarely another subspecies turning up.

 

Will you be tackling White-Tailed Deer?

~Thylo

 

That is a difficult one as G&G do not split this species, they don't even split Black-tailed deer from Mule deer, which if they had occured in Africa, would easily have done. They also present no own data on the geographic variation of White-tailed deer, but for sure many of the 38 subspecies are probably invalid and their might be hidden species, as shown by the recent Gutierrez et al. (2017) article (A gene-tree test of the traditional taxonomy of American deer: the importance of voucher specimens, geographic data, and dense sampling). So I will probably end up spending some time on discussing the current status of research and highlight which parts of the picture are missing, but I won't be able to say much about the validity of most subspecies...