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[Josh Greenman <joshg1973 AT yahoo.com>]

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/8299322.htm?1c


Gorilla Pair at Philadelphia Zoo Break Up

Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA - Five years have passed without the pitter-patter of baby 
gorilla feet, and zookeepers have decided that Demba and Chaka just 
aren't working out. Introduced to each other five years ago at the 
Philadelphia Zoo amid high reproductive hopes, it's not even clear the 
gorillas ever mated.

That's a big change for Chaka, who had been dubbed "best stud muffin" 
after fathering eight little ones at Cincinnati's zoo.

"Things have not gone that way," said Andy Baker, the Philadelphia 
Zoo's senior vice president for animal programs.

In May, Chaka, a 380-pound silverback, will travel to Columbia, S.C., 
to the Riverbanks Zoo's "Gorilla Base Camp." Philadelphia's two other 
male gorillas, Mike and Kimya, will go with him. Demba gets to keep 
their Philadelphia home, and she will be joined by a troupe from the 
St. Louis Zoo: a toddler, his parents and another female.

The departure of 19-year-old Chaka is bittersweet to keepers because he 
is a link to the era before a Christmas Eve 1995 fire at the zoo that 
killed 23 primates, including Chaka's parents. Chaka would have likely 
died, too, if he wasn't on a breeding loan program in Cincinnati.

Demba and Chaka were supposed to breed and start a new dynasty of apes. 
Gorilla handlers were particularly hoping that Demba, whose parents 
were wild-born, would mate to introduce her genes into the captive 
population.

But Demba may have been, biologically speaking, damaged goods from 
early gorilla-hood. She was raised by humans and didn't meet another of 
her own species for years. Even then, she never seemed quite 
comfortable with her own kind. But keepers figured that with Chaka's 
past success, passion might take hold.

Now at age 33, Demba's biological clock "has pretty well ticked its 
last tick," said Dan Wharton, the nation's gorilla coordinator and 
director of the Central Park Zoo.

The two females that Chaka will be living with are younger, and one is 
known to be fertile.