🕯️ LEGENDS GARDEN
🐧 Grape-kun
Really called Grape
Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) · Tobu Zoo, Miyashiro, Saitama Prefecture, Japan
Lives in Legends Garden
Grape-kun hatched on 16 April 1996 at Hamura Zoo in Tokyo and later lived at Tobu Zoo in Saitama, where his mate of about ten years left him for a younger male and he was kept apart from the colony. In April 2017 the zoo scattered 60 cardboard cutouts of characters from the anime Kemono Friends around the grounds, and the one placed on a rock in the penguin enclosure was Hululu, an anthropomorphic Humboldt penguin. Grape-kun stood in front of her for hours at a time, took up the courtship posture beside her and became agitated whenever keepers tried to take the cutout away. He became a national story in Japan, and the voice actress who played Hululu came to visit him; he died in October 2017 at 21, an ordinary age for the species in captivity.
What they do
Plants himself facing a flat cardboard penguin, spreads both flippers wide from his sides, tips his beak straight up to the sky and holds the ecstatic-display pose without moving.
An elderly bachelor with one fixed opinion and no interest in hearing alternatives
Lore
- ★The cutout was pure marketing - the zoo put 60 Kemono Friends characters around the park and he chose one and never let go
- ★Keepers moved the cutout away at closing time for safety; during a storm they took it down entirely and he was so distressed that they put it back
- ★The zoo denied press reports that he had stopped eating over her
- ★The voice actress behind the Hululu character travelled to the zoo to meet him
Helping the real one
No verified way to support this animal exists.
We will not invent one.
Tobu Zoo is a commercial park with no donation page found and fetched. No memorial fund exists for Grape-kun.
Where this comes from
- Wikipedia Grape-kun - hatch date, the Hululu cutout, death ↗
- Newsweek Penguin in love with anime poster dies by its side at Japanese zoo ↗
Every link here was checked twice before it was published. If one is dead or wrong, tell us.