Wednesday May 25, 2016
05:01 PM GMT+8
05:01 PM GMT+8
A Japanese aquarium said today it
had hatched two Humboldt penguin chicks after using artificial insemination,
the first time the technique has been successfully deployed for the vulnerable
species.
The two chicks were born early
April after frozen then thawed sperm from a male penguin was used to inseminate
a female penguin at the Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum in Yamaguchi
prefecture in western Japan.
“I was speechless when the babies
were born safely thanks to the success of the artificial insemination,” Teppei
Kushimoto, who is in charge of the penguins at the aquarium, told AFP.
The aquarium said it had taken
four years of experiments for scientists to figure out how to collect, freeze,
and correctly time the artificial insemination for the penguins.
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