PREVIEW

Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo has an adorable new resident - a grey seal pup born on 17 February 2024. The male pup, who weighed nearly 35 pounds at birth, will remain behind the scenes for approximately the next month and a half with his 11-year-old mother, Georgie. This is Georgie’s first time experiencing motherhood since she arrived at Brookfield Zoo in 2020. As a pup, Georgie was found stranded on an island in Georgetown, Maine, near the Atlantic Ocean in 2013. It was determined that she is fully blind in her left eye and functionally blind in her right eye. Due to her impaired vision, she was deemed unreleasable back to the wild. However, even with her impaired vision, Georgie is able to locate her pup by his distinct smell and call. The pup’s sire, 23-year-old Kiinaq was also stranded in the wild and deemed unreleasable when he was only a few months old. In his first week, the pup has gained 15 pounds. A grey seal mother’s milk is extremely rich in fat, and it is not unusual for the pup to gain several pounds a day. While nursing for the next few weeks, he can easily gain about 100 pounds, developing a thick layer of blubber. At birth, grey seals are born with silky white fur called lanugo which molts at about a month old.