Photograph courtesy Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute
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. “We came up with a day-by-day plan,” Malinsky told me.
Even before Calaya’s water broke, the zoo had written up a detailed birth plan. It mapped out all the forking paths of how things might go wrong. What if the mother died during birth? What if there were a need for a C-section? How would they speak to the media if the baby were unwell?
Yet the goal for a gorilla birth in a contemporary zoo is to make no intervention at all. During Calaya’s first pregnancy and delivery, five years earlier, she had gathered fabric scraps from other parts of the enclosure, and wrapped them around her head and abdomen; this appeared to be an effective makeshift pain-management strategy. Now, in her second pregnancy, though her amniotic sac had ruptured, she had not gone into labor. “We did what the human ob-gyn said she would do with one of her patients in the same situation,” Malinsky said. In the days after her water broke, since there had been no progression, Calaya was given amoxicillin and azithromycin, to prevent infection. “A human would probably be on bed rest, but we couldn’t really tell her to lie down,” Malinsky said. Calaya is “a gorilla’s gorilla.” Some gorillas in zoos like to ham it up for their caretakers, to win their approval and treats; others, like Calaya, are more focussed on the dynamics in their own troop.
“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.
When Malinsky came in to work at 6:20 A.M. the next day, Calaya was sitting and holding a baby in her arms. Calaya had sweat on her brow. “I don’t know if this is too much information for you, but when I came in, Calaya was eating the placenta,” Malinsky told me. “And the baby’s head was still damp. Those details made me think the birth was pretty recent.” Malinsky and her team don’t know how much the baby gorilla weighs, and that she is a girl was only learned through “opportunistic glances” in the days following the birth. (They will wait, maybe for months, to do a checkup, so as to avoid a distressing separation between mother and child. As for a name, the staff came up with three ideas—Lola, Mkali, and Zahra—and the final decision will be made through voting by the public.) Calaya has been kissing her daughter’s head and opening her hands to inspect her tiny fingers. Calaya has another child, Moke, a five-year-old male who “doesn’t know what to do with his emotions right now,” Malinsky said, laughing. He loves attention and so far has grown up with a lot of it. “He’ll do these drive-bys behind his mom and smack her on the back.” Baraka, the father, is nearby, but not too nearby—which is normal dad-gorilla behavior. The two other females in the enclosure, Kibibi and Mandara, have stayed close. There’s a sound that gorillas make, sort of a primate version of a purr—“There’s been a lot of that, too,” Malinsky said.
Not every gorilla birth at a zoo goes as smoothly. When I spoke to Kristen Lukas, the director of conservation and science at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, a few weeks before the healthy birth, she told me about a gorilla birth that happened there, in October, 2021. A twenty-three-year-old, Nneka, gave birth early. Baby gorillas weigh four pounds on average, nurse for three to four years, and tend to be in constant contact with their moms for the first six months of their lives. Nneka, for whatever reason, did not take an interest in her preemie baby. After the umbilical cord broke, she left the newborn under a shelf, where he wasn’t visible to staff. Unable to see or hear him, the zoo staff decided to go in, warm him up, and take vitals. Then the infant was given back to Nneka, but she still didn’t pick him up.
“Our females were all trained to retrieve a baby,” Lukas said. The gorillas had practiced with stuffed animals. “Within a minute, Fredrika, our older female, picked up the baby and started to care for it.” She had been taught to bring the baby to the mesh that separates the gorilla space from the caretakers. Fredrika would hold the baby up to the mesh, and staff members would feed it formula, at first through a small dropper and later through a bottle. “She knew we were helping the baby,” Lukas said. This went on, at first every two to three hours, throughout the day and night. Fredrika, forty-seven at the time, was the oldest female in the troop. She had last had a baby almost twenty years before. Nneka’s baby would suckle at her dry breast.
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.
Lukas is the chair of the Gorilla Species Survival Plan, which promotes the health and sustainability of gorillas in zoos and partners with groups that protect wild gorilla populations. An element of that work is to make breeding recommendations. One might think that, with an endangered species, the hope is always for more breeding. That is not the case. Most female gorillas in zoos are on birth control—the same pills that humans take. “As a guideline, if we want to maintain our population size, we need to have roughly fifteen births a year,” Lukas said.
There are three hundred and forty-three western lowland gorillas distributed among forty-eight zoos overseen by the G.S.S.P. “These gorillas will never be reintroduced into the wild,” though they function as ambassadors for the conservation of their species, Lukas said. Western lowland gorillas are probably the only gorillas you have ever seen in a zoo; mountain gorillas, made famous by Dian Fossey, live almost exclusively in the wild. All gorillas are either endangered or critically endangered: the mountain gorilla population is only around a thousand, spread across the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. There are about three hundred and fifty thousand western lowland gorillas in the wild, mostly in the Congo basin.
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. A high mean kinship value indicates that a gorilla is genetically well represented in the group; a lower value means that their genes are less well represented. The age of a gorilla also goes into the decision of whom and how to breed. “We don’t breed females until they are at least ten,” she said. “For males, we hold them off a little longer.” Although gorillas are biologically ready to reproduce as early as age five, they tend to make better parents when older; males are recommended for breeding closer to age twenty.
This timeline isn’t radically different from what happens with western lowland gorillas in the wild. Lead males don’t tolerate other males, beyond a certain age, in the group. Not even their own sons, often. A group tends to comprise one male, three or four females, and the youngsters. Young males are usually solitary, but sometimes they form “bachelor groups,” living together for a few years, Lukas explained. When I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of those young male gorillas, cast out, trying to make their way with one another, she added, “I know. I have three boys—I’m the mother of my own bachelor group.”
Sometimes a breeding recommendation is made for a male and a female gorilla who then don’t hit it off. Unlike with pandas, the keepers haven’t been reported to resort to pornography. When Calaya and Baraka were introduced to each other, however, they were copulating within thirty minutes. Last year, Kibibi was also taken off birth control—but there’s been no evidence of a spark between her and Baraka.
Lukas went to college with the intention of becoming a physical therapist. Then, in her junior year, she watched a documentary about Dian Fossey. Fossey was not a classically trained biologist or ecologist; Louis Leakey, the famed paleoanthropologist who had recruited Jane Goodall, supported Fossey to pursue long-term field studies of gorillas because of her background in occupational therapy—which he thought would make her good at reading behavior. (She had once dreamed of being a vet, but struggling in her chemistry and physics classes had discouraged her.) “What she discovered about the complexity of their family groups, about how gentle they were, that they were nearly vegans—it blew my mind,” Lukas said. Lukas felt that she had to do something for gorillas. She’s been studying their behavior for more than twenty years. One of her areas of research is how male gorillas in zoos have socialization needs that are distinct from those of females. “I feel like I won the lottery,” she said. 
The Astounding Birth of a Gorilla at the Smithsonian Zoo
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