Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan.
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