A baby gorilla left orphaned by his birth mother after she failed to bond with the newborn has been taken in by a foster mom.
Seattle-born Abeo, a Western Lowland gorilla, was rejected by first-time mom Akenji, sending caretakers of the now one-and-a-half month old on a quest to find a loving mother.
After an attempt at surrogacy didn’t work out, the Woodland Park Zoo collaborated with the Gorilla Species Survival Plan to find the distressed infant a new home.
Those behind the cooperative breeding program recalled a former foster success story at the Louisville Zoo, where a gorilla named Kweli adopted Kindi, who was orphaned at birth.
‘While we always hope for a natural mother-infant bond, circumstances sometimes require alternative solutions for the well-being of the gorilla,’ Louisville Zoo Director Dan Maloney said in a statement.
With hopes for a seamless transition, zookeepers in Louisville carefully planned Kweli, 40, and Abeo’s introduction.
Abeo’s human foster mother gave him a bottle and put him down for a nap before slowly creeping out of the baby’s enclosure and opening Kweli’s on the way out.
After a few hesitant minutes and a display of restlessness from Abeo, Kweli embraced her new foster son – and the two have been inseparable ever since.
Along with Kindi, now 8, the foster family is living together happily with many delighted visitors stopping by to see them.
Although it is rare for a gorilla mother to abandon her newborn, it does happen, sending zoologists everywhere on a mission to turn humans into temporary gorilla moms.
In cases like these, it is common practice for the human surrogate mother to feed the infants, hold the baby to their chest – while often wearing a black scrubs and a fur vest, mimicking the texture of a gorilla – before eventually carrying the baby on their back.
Human surrogate mothers have even been known to ‘knuckle-walk’ and vocalize like a gorilla.
Surrogacy teams often spend hours cuddling their charges and emulating primate behavior.
‘Whatever a gorilla mom would do with her baby is what we have to do,’ said Ron Evans, General Curator at the Louisville Zoo.
‘The role of the human surrogate mother is critical for the development of the baby.’
Western Lowland gorillas like Abeo are critically endangered in the wild, with less than 175,000.
The near-extinction numbers are due primarily to habitat destruction caused by logging, mineral mining and agricultural expansion.
The killing of wild animals to be used as human food is also a major threat to the Western Lowland gorilla population throughout the Central African rainforests.
Over 1,000 gorillas are illegally poached for the bushmeat trade each year.