Meet the Newborn, Endangered Western Lowland Gorilla
Zoo welcomes "really important addition" to breeding program.
LONDON— -- Mjukuu gave birth overnight in a cage at a London zoo.
After an eight and a half month gestation, the 15-year-old delivered a healthy Western lowland baby, a critically endangered gorilla species.
“Mom is tired,” gorilla keeper Daniel Simmonds of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) Zoo told ABC News. “She’s sleeping all the time, but she’s doing really well. She’s a brilliant mother.”
The gender of the baby is not known yet. “We never go inside ... and for the time being, the mother has been holding her baby against her chest,” he said. “We’ll find out in the next few days when she cleans him/her.”
If it’s a female, the gorilla will likely be able to stay with his family. But if it’s a male, he will have to move somewhere else once he reaches sexual maturity at age 10.
The newborn and mom cohabit with three other gorillas, including father, Kumbuka. “His job is to do nothing,” Simmonds said. “He’s there to protect them but he’s not allowed to play or touch his child for now. If he does, the mother will get very angry.”
This infant, who is already strong enough to grip independently to his mother’s back, “is a really important addition,” Simmonds said in a written statement, “not only to the Zoo, but for the European conservation breeding program.”
Because of poaching and disease, Western lowland gorillas’ numbers have declined by more than 60 percent in the past 20 to 25 years, according to World Wildlife website.
They are classified as “critically endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, an independent and comprehensive research group dedicated in evaluating the conservation status of plant and animal species.
“Most protected areas have serious poaching problems and almost half of the habitat under protected status has been hard hit by Ebola,” the IUCN reported.
In addition, the gorillas’ very low reproductive rates mean that even low levels of hunting are enough to cause population decline: “under the most optimistic scenarios, population recovery would require on the order of 75 years,” according to the IUCN.
The infant is the first offspring of the zoo's male gorilla, Kumbuka, who arrived in May 2013 from Paignton Zoo in South West England.
