Baby Moo Deng may only be two months old, but it’s never too early to learn a lesson in sharing the spotlight. Allow me to bring some pesto to the table as an accoutrement to our beloved “bouncy pork” pygmy hippo. Nine-month-old Pesto, a comically large king penguin chick at Australia’s Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium, has waddled into our hearts and inspired our creative sides.
At a whopping 52 pounds (~23.6 kg), ✨thick chick Pesto✨ is the largest baby king penguin born in captivity at the aquarium, weighing more than his parents combined and maintaining a steady diet of 25 to 32 fish a day. King penguins are primarily endemic to the subantarctic islands, the southernmost tip of Argentinian Patagonia, and the northern reaches of Antarctica, with adults typically weighing between 20 and 40 pounds (~9.1 and 18 kg). Though Pesto is being raised with utmost love and care by resident penguins Hudson and Tango, his biological father, Blake, is reportedly the biggest and oldest penguin in the colony. The aquarium attributes Pesto’s size to good genes and great parenting … we should all be so lucky.
Resembling a giant fuzzy black olive, Pesto is only a few weeks shy of his awkward teen era, during which he’ll lose his downy feathers and begin to transform into an adult penguin. He’s expected to lose quite a bit of the baby fat that made him a worldwide sensation during this metamorphosis, but fear not — he has been immortalized as equal parts cute and colossal thanks to his international fanbase.
Perhaps hindered by his blubber and down, Pesto is notably less boisterous than Moo Deng. He doesn’t appear to have quite the same fervor for biting his caretakers (save for a few exceptions), and photos of him are quite clear rather than blurry as he lavishes in the limelight.
That’s not to say that he isn’t a total diva, either … considering he could knock me over if he wanted to, I’ll allow it.
I change my mind … I endorse it.
We can always count on our family to bring us back down to earth when our heads get too big. As much as we all hate time outs, Pesto and his parents are closer than ever:
Relatively mild-mannered, Pesto has ensnared the public with his wholesome preciousness. His fluffy physique has inspired fan art across all sorts of media shared on the internet, including several absolutely precious illustrations.
I spoke with a few artists who made delectable Pesto fan art to find out why they were so moved by this Jupiter of penguins. New York City-based digital artist Gavin Shapiro kicked off this week by sharing his hand-drawn looping Pesto gif on X, which amassed over 113,000 likes on the platform in the last four days. “Pesto was calling to me as a subject,” he told Hyperallergic. A lifelong penguin enthusiast with plenty of related artwork in his portfolio, Shapiro said his pivot from three-dimensional renderings to old-school analog drawing found a perfect muse in the bumbling baby penguin.
The trail of footprints and Pesto’s puffed chest are the icing on the cake for me!
Also surfing the penguin wave, New Jersey-based illustrator and animal enthusiast Katy Tanis came up with a heartwarming greeting card design that perfectly captures Pesto as a symbol of originality and the importance of staying true to oneself — a message that especially resonates with the artists among his fanbase.
“I always thought king penguin chicks were visually amusing in comparison to their parents,” Tanis said in an email to Hyperallergic, pointing to the contrast between the wooly, blobby babies and their adult counterparts. “I use my work to create empathy for different species — often lesser-known species.”
Over in Sydney, Australia, illustrator Lenny Pelling is one of a few online who’ve drawn inspiration from Pesto’s namesake, rather than just his size. Lovingly rendered in colored pencil, “Pesto Pasta” depicts our big baby sitting comfortably in a nest of spaghetti, going to town on a noodle as if it’s one of the 32 fish he’s fed on a daily basis.
“His technique with these slippery noodles leaves much to be desired, and he sometimes finds himself in a tangle when tackling his dinner; but the resulting bulk is undeniably impressive,” Pelling wrote of the illustration on Instagram. “In fact, Pesto accidentally took out one of his keepers, who happened to get between him and a platter of kippers. This brown and fuzzy bowling pin is the very picture of health, the twinkle in the eye of his doting parents and the dream customer of any Mediterranean restaurateur.”
I’ll conclude with one last moment of appreciation for baby Pesto before he transitions into his terrible teens. His enduring lesson to us, perhaps, is to be comfortable in your own skin (or feathers) and always stop to smell the flowers — er, pop the bubbles:
