They were the penguin power couple, a world-famous same-sex pairing whose love was taught about in schools and inspired a pride parade float. Now Magic, mourning Sphen's death, has led their community in a tribute song.
Sphen died earlier this month just before his 12th birthday, the Sydney Sea Life Aquarium said Thursday, a long life for a Gentoo penguin in captivity who can live up to 13 years.
“The loss of Sphen is heartbreaking to the penguin colony, the team and everyone who has been inspired or positively impacted by Sphen and Magic’s story,” the aquarium’s general manager Richard Dilly said in a statement.
To process the loss of his partner, Magic, 8, was taken to Sphen’s body “so that he could understand his partner wouldn’t return,” Dilly said.
“He immediately started singing, which was beautifully reciprocated by the colony,” Dilly added.
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Sphen and Magic rose to celebrity status in 2018 when they began collecting pebbles to create a nest and became almost inseparable, regularly seen waddling around and swimming together.
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The duo were together for nearly six years, roughly half their average life span, and began expanding their family soon after. They co-parented two chicks, Lara, in 2018, and Clancy in 2020. Lara was nicknamed Sphengic after her parents by the public.
“It was a beautiful example of co-parenting as a same sex couple,” Vincent Savolainen, a professor of organismic biology at Imperial College London, told NBC News.
The parents would swap between patrolling their nest perimeters to ward off thieves and incubating the egg.
Zookeepers said Sphen and Magic were natural at parenting and had been given a real egg from a couple who had two eggs so that they were not excluded from the breeding season.
Homosexual bonds in animals, including birds, has been widely documented, experts say, often noticed as a desire among the couple to co-parent an offspring.
“It’s quite common in birds that two of them will get together for co-parenting,” said Savolainen. “That can happen for multiple reasons, usually it could be advantageous, for example two males can co parent because they’re stronger and are better able to protect the egg,” he said.
“Whether it is really homosexual behavior, one can debate,” he added.
Their love story was more than just fame for the zoo, as they rose to become icons of homosexuality in Australia and beyond.
The duo was also found together outside of their usual breeding season, which according to the zoo is unique for Gentoo penguins.
Inflatables of the celebrities were featured at the pride parade in Sydney in 2021, and last year their story was included in school resources for children in the state of New South Wales to help them learn “love in all shapes in sizes.”
“Sphen and Magic are more than just a beautiful love story – their impact around the world as a symbol of equality is immeasurable,” the zoo said in its statement Thursday.
The couple was featured in numerous books, documentaries and even in the Netflix series Atypical, with their fame becoming a way for the zoo to raise awareness about the threats to the species, including pollution and global warming.
The Sydney duo is not the only same-sex couple to make headlines.
The Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York is home to the male penguin couple Elmer and Lima, who became proud parents in 2022.
A male couple at a Dutch zoo nabbed the nest of a lesbian duo in 2020, a year after they stole an egg from a heterosexual couple. In 2019, a then 4-month old chick of the penguin mothers Rocky and Marama at the Sea Life Aquarium in London became the world’s first “genderless” penguin chick.
Rachel Ankler, a spokesperson for the aquarium in Sydney, told NBC News that an update on Magic’s condition and the next breeding season will be shared in the coming weeks.
“Magic may not get in partnership with another penguin ever again, especially because of his older age,” Savolainen said. “But there is a possibility he may be with another male or female penguin.”
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