THOUSANDS of visitors flooded Košice Zoo on June 1 to see three female and two male Humboldt penguins brought over last weekend from Prague, the SITA newswire wrote.
Štefan Kollár, the zoo’s director, said that the penguins’ new home is about three acres big, contains about 90 cubic metres of water, and cost Sk2.5 million.
The penguins are fed Pacific herrings and mackerels up to 10 centimetres long that have minerals and salts added to them. In the future, the zoo plans to add nine more.
A pair of seals brought to the zoo last year drew an additional 20,000 visitors, raising the total to about 140,000. That number is expected to rise, as more people have been visiting the zoo recently, Kollár told the ČTK newswire.
Even though the Humboldt penguin is used to much lower temperatures in his natural habitat in South America, new animals can cool down when the temperature in Košice exceeds 30° Celsius by swimming in the zoo’s 1.5-metre pool.