A baby penguin at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium in Australia is winning hearts (and social media adoration) for his incredibly cute—and gigantic—appearance. Pesto is just nine months old and weighs 50 pounds, towering over his adoptive parents Hudson and Tango. “At just nine months old, Pesto tips the scales at a whopping 21kg, thanks to his hearty appetite of 25 fish a day. He’s officially the largest chick SEA LIFE Melbourne has ever seen, making him a huge hit with guests and fans around the world,” the aquarium says. Here’s what you need to know about this fuzzy little fellow.
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Why Is Pesto Such a Cute Chonker?
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Pesto’s weight is down to a number of factors, says the aquarium. “Firstly, his biological dad, Blake, is our biggest and oldest penguin. Secondly, he's had amazing parents raising him! So, the combination of good genes and good parents explains his current weight, but he will lose a lot of this when he fledges (develops his adult feathers).”
He’s All Fluff
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Pesto is all fluffiness. "If I poked him, my entire finger would completely [disappear] deep in his feathers,” the aquarium's Jacinta Early tells the BBC. "When he does start to fledge, he'll lose a lot of that baby fluff, and he'll also lose much of that weight, so he'll slim down nice and sleek. He tends to be the first one to kind of say hi [to keepers] and he also does respond to his name. We definitely do have our favorites. [But] Pesto seems to be a little bit in love with all the keepers as well."
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Big Baby
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Pesto may seem large, but Prof Mary-Anne Lea, a professor of marine and polar predator ecology at the University of Tasmania, says it’s not impossible for baby penguins to be large. “In the wild, Pesto would have good body reserves,” she told The Guardian. “It would imply that he had good parents who fed him well, and then that would give him longer before he needed to really start foraging effectively for himself. There’s lots of indicators of animal health and I think if the husbandry team were concerned about that, they would do what’s appropriate.”
Pesto the Superstar
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Pesto is a social media superstar, with 4.2 billion people having viewed him through Sea Life Melbourne’s social media channels. “[The] Pesto the penguin page on our website is the most viewed and it is where everyone is going,” Olivia Wilson, a spokesperson for Merlin Entertainments, tells The Guardian. “He has brought immense joy to everyone here at Sea Life Melbourne and to penguin fans around the world,” says Sea Life Melbourne’s general manager, Claire Burrell.
