Olivia Rodrigo is currently Down Under for her Guts World Tour, and amid her four-show stop in Melbourne, Olivia carved out some time to meet with a real star. Of course I’m talking about Pesto, the giant baby penguin and greatest specimen of frizzy hair to come out of the Australian city since Kath of Kath & Kim. He’s bigger, taller, and fluffier than his parents, and indeed the largest king penguin chick the Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium has ever seen. Of course pop stars should be coming to pay homage to the king (#TheRealKingOfAustralia). And thankfully for us, the meeting was documented with some floof-tacular photos and videos.
“Thanks for the visit Olivia! Pesto loved meeting another super fan Good luck with the the rest of your Melbourne shows!” Sea Life Melbourne replied to Rodrigo’s post.
Rodrigo also shared two pictures from her visit on her Instagram Stories. She was dressed for the cool temps inside the aquarium’s penguin enclosure.
Pesto is a 10-month-old king penguin and weighs about 46 pounds, according to Sea Life Melbourne’s website. He is the largest chick the aquarium has ever seen and is even larger than his parents. His biological father, Blake, is the aquarium’s biggest adult and oldest penguin.
The penguin is likely to lose weight when he fledges, or when he develops adult feathers. His keepers predict he will weigh around 33 pounds during the process, reports the Associated Press.
“He’s going to start losing that really adorable baby fluff,” Sea Life Melbourne education supervisor Jacinta Early told the AP in September. “It might take him one to two months to really get rid of it. Then he’ll be nice and sleek and streamlined.”
“Pesto has reached more than 1.9 billion people across the globe, so he really is a draw card for visitation to Victoria,” Sea Life Melbourne senior keeper Michaela Smale told 9News in September.
Despite his age, Pesto’s keepers didn’t know he was a boy until last month. King penguins are non-sexually dimorphic, so they do not have visible traits to allow keepers to distinguish their sex. They needed a blood sample to discover Pesto is male. The gender reveal video logged over 1.7 million views on TikTok.
Rodrigo began a four-night stand at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena on Oct. 9. On Oct. 17, she will start another four-night stand, this time at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney. Her Guts World Tour will continue with a group of dates in South America in March.
Geez, so the countdown really is on until Pesto fledges and loses his fluff (meanwhile my fledge appears to be nowhere in sight, sigh). And what happens once Pesto matures, will the world just drop him?! We can’t let this happen! Just because he’ll be an adult doesn’t mean he still won’t be able to look indifferent and/or completely uninterested in photos with humans, as he appears in most of the shots with Olivia. But there is one where it looks like he’s talking back to Olivia as she poses with double-handed peace signs. (I’d like to think Pesto was squawking against the resemblance to Richard Nixon’s similar infamous gesture, rather than objecting to the notion of peace itself.) Meanwhile, the babe is only 10-months old and already people are talking about him dating another child star, the only other baby animal of equal fame at the moment, Moo Deng. We have John Stewart to thank for suggesting this relationship into the collective consciousness. I’m not opposed to mixed-species dating, it’s just… can’t we let them be kids?!
obsessed with olivia rodrigo meeting pesto the penguin this is exactly what famous people should be doing pic.twitter.com/4gqTd6LuRn
— Natasha Roy (@natasharoyy) October 11, 2024
Photos via Instagram/YouTube/Twitter and credit: IPA/INSTARimages, FV/Cover Images