Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo welcomed a new resident – a grey seal pup born on 17 February 2024. This male pup, weighing nearly 35 pounds at birth, will stay behind the scenes for about the next month and a half with his 11-year-old mother, Georgie. Georgie is experiencing motherhood for the first time since her arrival at Brookfield Zoo in 2020. As a pup, Georgie was discovered stranded on an island in Georgetown, Maine, near the Atlantic Ocean in 2013. She was found to be fully blind in her left eye and functionally blind in her right eye, making her unable to be released back into the wild. Despite her impaired vision, Georgie is able to find her pup by his unique smell and call. The pup’s sire, Kiinaq, who is 23 years old, was also stranded in the wild and deemed unreleasable when he was just a few months old. In his first week, the pup has already gained 15 pounds thanks to the rich fat content in his mother’s milk. It is not uncommon for a grey seal pup to gain several pounds a day while nursing, potentially reaching a weight gain of about 100 pounds in the next few weeks and developing a thick layer of blubber. Grey seals are born with lanugo, a silky white fur, which typically sheds at around one month old.
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