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Posted on Fri, Apr. 30, 2004

Baby's mom not gibbon him love

Newborn ape settles for bottle feedings

BY LAURA YUEN
Pioneer Press

Let's be honest. Babies can be scary. When Tia, a white-cheeked gibbon, 
gave birth to a baby two weeks ago, she couldn't warm up to the idea of 
being a mom. Zookeepers encouraged her to take a liking to the baby 
boy, but she was terrified.

"Her reaction was alarm: 'What is this thing?' " said Christine 
McKnight, the tropics keeper at the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley. "She 
ran in the opposite direction."

So the little guy, still unnamed, has been living in an incubator in a 
zoo office. There, he clings to a surrogate mom: a furry, long-armed 
stuffed animal. McKnight and others bottle-feed him baby formula six 
times a day.

Ideally, he should be raised by both parents so he can learn to 
socialize — and eventually, how to mate, McKnight said.

"We know we are his source of food, but we don't want him to think of 
us as moms totally," she said. "We want him to think of himself as a 
gibbon."

Mating is essential for the endangered small primate apes, which, in 
their natural habitat, climb and swing from trees in the rainforests of 
Southeast Asia. About 14,000 of their kind exist in the wild. The 
Minnesota newborn is the ninth gibbon born at the zoo.

Gibbons are not to be confused with monkeys or orangutans.

Tia's reluctance to embrace motherhood isn't especially surprising to 
zookeepers because she's a first-time mom and the youngest in her 
family. She never witnessed her own mother cradling or nursing her 
young, and that makes her more likely to reject her baby.

The zookeepers have tried to induce some motherly affection by sedating 
her with anesthesia. As she dozed, they placed the baby on her stomach.

But when she awoke, she tried to pry him off her. The baby mightily 
hung on, slipping onto her back.

His father, Bailey, also shows no interest in the infant.