A few days ago, reports emerged that with humans practicing social distancing, penguins were returning to their natural habitats—aquarium concourses.
Those reports weren’t entirely true. It turned out the penguins were just being allowed to walk around a little bit and look at their neighbors, and it sounds like in at least one of these cases, it was a thing even before aquariums had to close their doors to the outside world:
That’s January. Just another day in Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town. No COVID-19 fears there. Penguins walking, penguins hopping, penguins having a good time.
But some aquariums really did seem to be letting their
penguins explore for social distancing-related reasons. Like the Shedd, in
Chicago (Fun fact about the Shedd: a few years ago, my high school had
its prom there. When I was in high school, our prom was at a convention center.
Big upgrade. Hopefully they still booed one of the juniors on prom court like
we did, though):
This is fun. This is good. In the right quantity, this could keep me entertained for days. But it’s now been four days since we got an update on those funny little birds, and my attention span has withered. I can only watch the same few videos for so long. So please, if you’re reading this, and you own an aquarium, take your penguins for a walk, and videotape it, and post it on Twitter. We could use more of this sort of thing.
