When the National Zoo’s female elephant calf, Linh Mai, saw zookeeper Megan Mrozinski with a big bottle of formula Tuesday morning, the animal hurried after her. It was 11:15. Feeding time.
Mrozinski leaned over the barrier of the indoor elephant compound and stuck the nipple of the bottle into the baby’s mouth. The contents, almost two quarts, were gone in about three minutes.
Standing off to one side was an older female elephant, Swarna, 52, munching treats from another keeper. Swarna has never had a calf of her own. But she is raising 2-month-old Linh Mai in place of her aggressive mother, the zoo said.
The details of the unusual social arrangement were unveiled Tuesday when Linh Mai, the first elephant born at the zoo in almost 25 years, and only the third in the zoo’s 136-year history, was presented to the media ahead of her public debut.
On Wednesday, zoo members will get to see Linh Mai for the first time during a special five-day viewing period. After that, starting April 22, the general public will get to see her in person and on the elephant cam.
On Tuesday she wandered around the sunny enclosure, looking slightly awkward, with fuzzy hair on her head. She weighed 308 pounds when she was born on Feb. 2. She now weighs more than 460 pounds.
“She is gaining approximately 25 to 30 pounds a week,” elephant manager Robbie Clark said Tuesday. She gets a bottle every two hours. Her name, pronounced LIN-my, means “spirit blossom.”
She still has her “milk teeth,” or baby teeth, which don’t allow her to chew, he said. They will eventually fall out and be replaced by molars. She will go through six sets of teeth during her life, he said.
Shortly after she was born, Linh Mai developed some worrisome diarrhea. Keepers noticed that she wasn’t gaining weight and seemed to lack energy. They were also concerned that she might get dehydrated.
For 14 days, she was treated with a novel procedure called a fecal microbiota transplant. Six times a day, about two teaspoons of a “slurry” of feces — imported from a healthy baby elephant at a zoo in Ohio — was added to Linh Mai’s formula.
The idea was that feces from a donor elephant with a healthy gut biome would infuse healthy bacteria into Linh Mai’s disrupted biome and fight the diarrhea.
It worked, zoo experts said Tuesday.
But they are distressed that the calf has not been accepted by her mother, Nhi Linh, nor her grandmother, Trong Nhi.
Linh Mai has not been able to nurse because her mother has been aggressive and menacing toward her, zoo experts said. Her mother has at times charged at the barriers separating them, said Tony Barthel, the zoo’s director of animal care.
“That has waxed and waned over time,” he said. “Right now I feel like it would be detrimental to Linh Mai’s health if we tried to put them together.”
Elephant manager Clark said: “We haven’t made much progress in terms of the relationship between her and her mother. … We haven’t seen that spark yet where Nhi Linh is showing positive behavior towards the calf.”
Elephants are extremely social, and the calf should be learning from her mother, he said. (Her father is the zoo’s male, Spike. But males have no role in raising offspring, he said.)
So Swarna, who was born in Sri Lanka and once lived in an elephant orphanage there, has stepped into the role of mother. She came to the National Zoo from the Calgary Zoo, in Canada, in 2014.
“Swarna is basically her full-time active mom,” Clark said. “She goes to Swarna for attention, comfort, when she’s nervous, when she’s scared.”
Linh Mai is also learning how to use her trunk, which, he said, takes years to master. “She’s already watching how Swarna uses hers,” he said. “She’s picking things up and holding them. She’s drinking water with her trunk already.”
But, he said, the older elephant has yet to teach the calf manners, and some discipline will be needed: “She allows Linh Mai to do whatever she wants.”
He said the zoo hopes it can gradually create a bond between the calf and her mother. But short of that, Linh Mai can be reared by her stand-in mom.
It’s not clear why Nhi Linh is hostile to her calf. Nhi Linh and her mother, Trong Nhi, had both been impregnated by Spike at about the same time in April 2024. But Trong Nhi’s fetus died in utero and was stillborn on Dec. 12. That may be playing a role, Clark said.
The National Zoo, in Northwest Washington, now has seven elephants, including the calf. Asian elephants are considered a critically endangered species, the zoo said.
The zoo’s elephant community center had been closed since the calf’s birth to provide a quiet space for Linh Mai to bond with the other elephants and her keepers.
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