Dodie, a 46-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Gladys Porter Zoo, gave birth to a healthy daughter at 3 a.m. on July 19. It is her fourth infant.
Mother and infant are both doing well. They can be seen together on exhibit between 9:00 and 10:30 a.m., with their outdoor time increasing as the newborn adjusts to the temperature in Brownsville.
The father is Mango, a 31-year-old male who came to the zoo on a breeding loan from Rolling Hills Zoo in Salina, Kansas.
The big sister problem
Dodie’s adolescent daughter Kade lives with the group, and for now she has been kept from full access to the baby.
“Kade, like many children, showed a bit of jealousy when Dodie first gave birth,” said Walter DuPree, the zoo’s curator of mammals. “So, we were a little concerned about giving her full access to her mother and the infant. We didn’t see aggression, but were concerned about mischief.”
Keepers plan to widen Kade’s access gradually. There is a reason to bother rather than simply separate her: in the wild, adolescent females help their mothers raise younger siblings, and that is where they learn to do it themselves. Young orangutans stay with their mothers for up to seven years, learning where food is, how to build a nest and how to raise an infant.
An adolescent female who never gets that apprenticeship is a harder animal to breed successfully later. Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo has been running formal maternal training with an orangutan for exactly that reason.
A zoo with an orangutan record
The zoo counts 25 successful orangutan births in its 52-year history, an unusual number for a collection of its size, and the program has produced at least one genuine first: in 1970, a local obstetrician and the zoo’s late veterinarian and director, Don Farst, performed what is on record as the first cesarean section on a great ape, on a female orangutan here.
Sumatran orangutans are listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. The pressure on them is habitat: large-scale conversion of forest to palm oil plantations, commercial logging and farming.
