Pen, or Pan-chan if you want to show the little girl some respect, is a 6-year-old African penguin from Japan who went missing. One minute, she was in a pen on a beach on Himakajima island. The next, she was gone. She swam through a hole in her enclosure and made out to the open sea. The lost penguin was found two weeks later. Her keepers are calling it a miracle.
She escaped while swimming with the keepers at Gekidan Penters zoo. Pen was born and raised in captivity, so there was nearly no chance she was going to survive in open waters. She didn’t learn any survival skills and isn’t physically developed to withstand the rough seas. African penguins like her usually swim around 25 miles a day. But since she was bred into captivity, her stamina is lower, and her muscle mass is nowhere near where it needs to be to survive in the wild.
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On top of that, a typhoon called Shanshan hit. Huge wind gusts, torrential downpours. It knocked out power, forced millions of people to evacuate, and killed six. How is a little lost penguin born and bred into captivity supposed to survive that?
Well, she did. And she can thank the typhoon that should’ve killed her.
Her biggest enemies out in the ocean would have been collisions with boats and the possibility of getting caught in a fishing net. But with the typhoon out there, the boats weren’t operating. She also could’ve died from the heat. But the storm cooled everything off and provided fresh water to drink.
All of these factors combined to create the perfect environment to keep Pen lingering 8 miles from the beach where she first went missing. She was gone for two weeks but was found only 10 minutes away from the facility she calls home.
