In May, Calaya, a 20-year-old gorilla at the Smithsonian National Zoo, gave birth to a baby girl. In the weeks since, “Calaya has been kissing her daughter’s head and opening her hands to inspect her tiny fingers,” Rivka Galchen writes. Read more:
In early May, a zookeeper at the Smithsonian National Zoo was walking underneath the gorilla enclosure when she saw a deluge of what looked like water. She thought that maybe a pipe had burst. In fact, it was amniotic fluid: Calaya, a twenty-year-old western lowland gorilla, was an expectant mother. Becky Malinsky—the zoo’s curator of primates—and her team consulted veterinarians, both in-house and external, and an ob-gyn who works with humans.
“That initial twenty-four hours, we had keepers staying the entirety of the night,” Malinsky said. “Then we backed off to three check-ins a night.” Then two. Then one. On the Friday before Memorial Day, a keeper texted Malinsky at midnight: “Everything is good here. Still no baby.” Calaya was relaxing in her nest, one she had made out of alfalfa, hay, sheets, and blankets.. the next day, Calaya was sitting and holding a baby in her arms. Calaya had sweat on her brow.
The baby was named Kayembe, meaning “extraordinary.” The care team eventually noticed that his formula intake was decreasing. Yet he was continuing to grow and seemed well. It was a mystery. Soon after, Lukas said, “One of the keepers noticed that Freddy had started to lactate.” “We even sent milk samples to the Smithsonian, to confirm that it was milk.” The Smithsonian confirmed that it was ordinary gorilla breast milk. “So, you never know, is what I am trying to say,” Lukas told me.
In making breeding recommendations, the G.S.S.P. aims to keep genetic diversity within the zoo population as high as possible. It also wants to maintain the population at a level that zoos can accommodate, and, because gorillas are so beloved, to make sure that space remains for less popular primates, like lemurs and bonobos. “So, when we meet every two years, we have a mean kinship value for each gorilla,” Lukas said.
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