Four Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldti) set off for Stavropol Krai on Friday, October 23, and arrived safely two days later, on Sunday, October 25. Their new home is the Alpaca Farm in the village of Temnolesskaya. The birds have some unusual names: Trio-Rio, Gul-Gul, Skat-Pirat (“Stingray the Pirate”), and Radiy-Palladiy (“Radium-Palladium”). They hatched at the Primorsky Aquarium last October. According to bird keepers who raised them, this is the shyest group ever to have “fledged” from the Primorsky Aquarium. Only the females have shown real curiosity and boldness.
Before departure, the penguins completed a 21-day quarantine in the Science and Acclimation Building, where they received the necessary veterinary care.
Staff at the Stavropol zoo report that the newcomers are doing well. Almost immediately after arrival they began exploring their new pool, establishing contact with the three Humboldt penguins already living there, and inspecting the zoo's visitors. Their appetite was another good sign of health: within an hour of moving in, they were accepting food from the hands of their keepers.
These four birds found their new home through an open auction held in October this year. Since 2025, a series of electronic auctions has placed 39 penguins from Primorye in zoos and aquariums in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh, Volgograd, Kazan, Orenburg, and Stavropol Krai.
Humboldt penguins first arrived at the Primorsky Aquarium in 2018, when 14 founder birds were brought from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The colony has since produced 55 chicks. Today the Aquarium houses Russia's largest colony of the species. It is also the only institution in the country that determines the sex of its penguins using molecular-genetic methods. This careful, science-based approach to keeping and breeding the birds has drawn strong interest from zoo keepers and ornithologists across Russia.
