Every morning while the great apes of the L.A. Zoo are sleeping, Tania Prebble goes around distributing their food, medicine and other essentials.
She tosses carrots, celery and other fibrous treats like cucumbers on top of the branches and leaves that are reminiscent of the apes’ West Central Africa rainforest habitat.
But as of late, Prebble’s morning rounds have been a little different. She’s also taken along bedding — a lot more than usual — to help shepherd in an L.A. Zoo “baby boom” of great apes over the last four months.
The most recent primate was born Nov. 22 to 31-year-old N’djia and silverback Kelly, 38, whose daughter Angela in 2020 was the first gorilla born at the L.A. Zoo in more than 20 years.
The baby male gorilla has not yet been named by zoo staff, but he has already been introduced to his older sister.
“Mom has definitely got a nice maternal hold and is very protective of the baby,” said Prebble, animal keeper of the zoo’s western lowland gorillas. “Angela is starting to get a little bit more curious. She’s coming up very gently, mom has been letting her get closer and do sweet little kisses.”
Along with Angela’s newest sibling, the zoo has welcomed four other great apes recently.
Throughout two weeks starting in August, two chimpanzees gave birth — 35-year-old Yoshi gave birth to a female offspring, the first chimp born at the zoo in more than 10 years, followed by Vindi, an 18-year-old first-time mom, who delivered a female infant.
Chimpanzee Zoe, also an experienced mother, gave birth to a male infant earlier in November. In October, orangutan mother Kalim had a baby offspring from father Isim, raising the number of Bornean orangutans at the zoo to seven.
On a recent weekday morning as Prebble finished up her check on the gorilla’s 26,000-square-foot enclosure and the zoo opened for business, children swarmed the barrier to catch a glimpse of the newborn gorilla clinging to his mother’s chest.
Zoo docents hovered nearby to answer questions while parents crouched beside their toddlers and pointed to similarities with the apes’ hands and feet.
As exciting as this great ape baby boom is for L.A. Zoo visitors, it is by no means a surprise to its staff, who have prepared for this moment for years with a slate of contingency plans for every possible scenario.
It is, however, a happy coincidence that all births happened within a four-month span.
“With the last round of babies, I had a lot of visitors tell me that they started caring more about chimps because they saw these babies and they’re so adorable,” said animal keeper Amy Rosson, who mainly cares for the chimpanzees at the Mahale Mountains habitat.
The baby boom is a direct result of breeding recommendations from the Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums, which creates a Species Survival Plan that determines which animals to prioritize for breeding around the world and with which mates to reduce the risk of inbreeding and to conserve populations in human care.
There are many questions these AZA matchmakers ask themselves before making breeding recommendations, and they extend beyond genetic and personality compatibility: Will these animals be able to create subgroups? Can the staff hand-rear the offspring if need be? Are there surrogate females at that institution that can step in if a mother rejects her infant?
In the end, these efforts still fall back on timing and luck, zoo officials say.
“It also is up to the animals,” says Dominick Dorsa II, director of Animal Programs. “You can have a breeding recommendation in place, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be successful with the pregnancy and birth.”
For the zoo’s newest parents, the western lowland gorillas, their SSP recommendation was made in 2023 and was straightforward.
N’djia was taken off birth control in order to breed with Kelly, which would give their daughter Angela the opportunity to have a playmate as she would in the wild. This will ultimately help with Angela’s socialization and the well-being of the entire family.
The Bornean orangutan’s SSP, meanwhile, was created in February as part of a long-standing breeding recommendation because Kalim, the female, had not successfully conceived in the past. Orangutans have the longest inter-birth interval of all nonhuman primates; a single infant is born and cared for by its mother for seven to eight years before another infant is born.
Breeding can be trickier for chimpanzees, who are multimate animals.
“Even though there’s an alpha male, the more subordinate males within the troop will mate with the females and do what’s called sneak breeding,” said Candace Sclimenti, curator of mammals at the zoo. “ The subordinates will take a female off and secretly breed her so that the alpha doesn’t see.”
In 2022, the zoo welcomed one of the most genetically valuable chimpanzee males in North America, Pu’iwa, from Hawaii. As part of the chimpanzee troop’s SSP recommendations the following year, Pu’iwa was allowed to mate with two females.
This resulted in the third pregnancy of 35-year-old female Yoshi, and the birth of their first female infant, coincidentally on Pu’iwa’s birthday, Aug. 20.
First-time mother Vindi, on the other hand, had her pick of four males.
“So we left her with the group and let nature take its course,” Sclimenti said. “We actually do a DNA test on the infant to determine paternity because we don’t know.”
Zoo officials say the new infants will play a beneficial role in the well-being and dynamics of the entire chimpanzee troop, which is one of the largest of any zoo in the country with, now, 17 total individuals.
“ It’s really fun for the group because [the older chimps] love babies,” Rosson said. “ When [the babies] get older, they’ll hitch a ride on a different group member and it’s just really a nice family dynamic to see.”
In preparation for the triple chimp births, the zoo created a separate maternal group with experienced mothers in order to ensure the acclimation of a first-time mother, Vindi, who they say is a bit spicy. Staff members were unsure if she’d take to being a mother and have been pleased with what they’ve seen.
“She was just so natural,” Rosson said.
Once the maternal group is well-adjusted in their role, they will integrate back with the larger troop, zoo officials said.
For the dozen staff members who care for the zoo’s great apes, the baby boom has been a welcomed reminder of why some of them entered the profession in the first place.
“Everyone that’s involved is here for the love of animals and the passion and wanting to leave the planet a better place than we have made it,” said Sclimenti, the zoo’s mammal curator.
At the same time, Prebble said, she hopes that visitors can learn more about newborn primates, which are classified as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This is often due to dangers animals face in the wild, including poaching for bushmeat, habitat loss and degradation — in some instances caused by mineral hunting for electronics — as well as disease.
“With the [population of gorillas] ranging from 300,000 in the wild to 300 or so in the zoos — it’s a big impact what we can do ourselves to help,” she said.
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