Featured Image Credit: The Verge
By Jessica Kittel
As Valentine’s Day draws near, we recognize all kinds of loves. Romantic love, familial love, love for our friends, and then there’s an extra special kind of love: penguin love. In no two penguins is this love more evident than in Amigo and Elizabeth, residents of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, as reported on wsls.com.
They just take lovebirds to a whole new level. Amigo and Elizabeth are African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) and, like many other penguin species, are monogamous. Some breeding pairs are known to have stayed together for a whole decade!
According to torontozoo.com, African penguins are found on the coast and islands of southern Africa as well as Namibia. Most of their time is spent at sea so the penguin couples don’t actually spend the majority of the year together. However, eventually, they return to the same breeding colonies (known as rookeries) every year where they’ll get their courtship on.
Like many other birds, they have unique and complicated courtship displays. For African penguins, the male shuffles around the female and occasionally touch her beak (we can only assume that’s some flirty move). Then the two lovebirds will hug each other (seriously, they stand chest to chest and wrap their flippers around each other) and kiss (they interlock their bills).
Penguins obviously know a thing or two about romance, especially Elizabeth and her Amigo.
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