Same-sex New York penguins adopt a pup 0:47
(CNN) --
A pair of penguins received a very special New Year's gift at a New York zoo: They became the first same-sex foster parents there to successfully hatch an egg.
The chick was born on January 1 at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York, the zoo announced in a news release.
The new parents, Elmer and Lima, two Humboldt penguins, were born at the zoo: the first in 2016 and the second in 2019. They became a couple in the fall of 2021 during the current breeding season.
The zoo said Elmer got his name "because the egg he hatched from was accidentally damaged by his parents and the care team repaired it using Elmer's glue."
To prevent this type of unintentional damage, the zoo explained that it sometimes transfers an egg from its birth parents to foster parents, who then care for it while the other pair incubates a dummy egg.
Lima Zoo welcomes 8 endangered Humboldt penguin cubs
The egg that Elmer and Lima hatched was originally laid by the heterosexual couple of Poquita and Vente.
But after the site team detected a viable embryo inside, they transferred it to the new parents.
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"At our first health check, when the chick was five days old, it weighed 226 grams," zoo director Ted Fox said in a news release.
"He is being raised and cared for by Elmer and Lima, who do a great job," he added.
Fox said that not all parents were good at incubating eggs.
Precisely, some break the egg, do not incubate it correctly or fight over who incubates it at all times, she explained.
"This is how we assess who will make good adoptive parents, and Elmer and Lima were exemplary in all aspects of egg care," Fox added, commenting that the couple's story "will help people of all ages and backgrounds interact with animals.
At least two pairs of penguins have hatched their eggs in the past.
And the fact that Elmer and Lima "built a nest and defended their territory" was a sign that they could be good parents, the zoo statement added.
Elmer and Lima are one of many same-sex penguin couples in the world.
Among them, a pair of female gentoo penguins in an aquarium in Spain, a pair of male king penguins in a Berlin zoo and a pair of male gentoo penguins in an aquarium in Sydney.
Same-sex penguin couple adopt an egg 0:46
But the most famous couple remains that of chinstrap penguins Silo and Roy, who found love at the Central Park Zoo in 1998, and hatched and raised a chick named Tango.
Though their love didn't last—Silo left Roy for his new love, Scrappy, in 2005—their family inspired an award-winning children's book.
Elmer and Lima are Humboldt penguins, classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The organization says that the decline in their numbers in Peru "indicates that there is likely to be a rapid underlying decline in their numbers."
The Rosamond Gifford Zoo has 28 Humboldt penguins in its current colony, which started with 18, and have hatched a total of 55 chicks, many of which have been moved elsewhere.
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