The staff at Auckland's Kelly Tarlton's Sea-life Aquarium are today celebrating Mother's Day with baby penguins they've helped hatch.
The team at Kelly Tarlton's were forced to take one egg from its mother and incubate it, when they noticed a hole in the shell. It was up to team leader Maddie Seaman to take on the painstaking job of hatching the chick.
"We realised it was still alive, miraculously after all that time, we'd been checking on it and knew it had a heartbeat and that it was fertile so we hatched it out ourselves. It's a pretty laborious process you have to be very careful," says Ms Seaman.
He is now back with his parents in an enclosure that houses both Gentoo Penguins and King Penguins. There is bound to be mix of relationships but it is of course the baby area where the maternal instinct runs the strongest.
In the King Penguin crèche a range of parenting styles have been adopted, there is even a solo Mum and a same sex couple.
"We had one female lay an egg in the enclosure and the male didn't show up the female incubated the egg and when it hatched we gave it to Thelma and Louise and they've been foster mothers and they've done an amazing job."
Today Mother's Day is celebrated by all makeup of families.
Newshub
