Green is clean

The water at Penguin Coast may look a bit green but don’t worry, it’s natural!

You’ve been asking us why the water in our penguin pool is looking a bit green. So, we thought a little blog post about it might be helpful.

Ah sunshine! It’s a wonderful thing right? And our penguins love basking on the rocks and then taking a dip in their pool to cool off! But with sunshine comes green algae blooms. These are completely natural and pose no threat to the health of our penguins. Whilst the sun shines there’s nothing we can do to improve the water clarity at Penguin Coast but luckily we’ve built our enclosure so there are plenty of viewing places so you can still see our penguins when they’re on the rocks and from above as they swim in their pool.

It’s a bit green but that’s definitely two of our new Macaroni penguins we spy right there!

As always, we monitor the pool water quality daily in our state-of-the-art penguin pump house, to make sure it’s providing the best and most natural environment for our penguins at all times. This includes mixing in salt to keep it at the same level of salinity as sea water which is best for our penguins, removing impurities (that’s penguin poop amongst other things) and adding nutrients to keep our penguins healthy.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that our penguins are preparing for their annual moult – when they grow their new, shiny, water-repellant feathers. They need to conserve energy for this so they’re currently gorging on fish to gain weight as during the moult they don’t feel much like eating. So don’t worry if they’re looking well covered, shall we say, this is completely normal. During the moult, you may seem them laying around and gasping for air – again don’t worry as this is normal. They may not look their best either but try not to mention it to them – no-one likes a bad hair day.

There were a lot of bad hair days during last year’s moult!