IFAW's Animal Rescue Blog: TAIPING FOUR GORILLA ADOPTS INFANT GORILLA AS HER OWN

August 07, 2008

TAIPING FOUR GORILLA ADOPTS INFANT GORILLA AS HER OWN

Abbey, one of the ‘Taiping Four’ gorillas, has found new meaning to life as she became surrogate mother to a newly arrived orphan gorilla at the Limbe Wildlife Centre in Cameroon.

The following update is provided by The Pan-African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA) and IFAW’s partner the Limbe Wildlife Centre in Cameroon.

Abbey recently became the surrogate mother to Bolo, a one-year old orphan, at the Limbe Wildlife Center in Cameroon.

Bolo arrived after being confiscated from poachers in December, and it was feared she might be too young to ever integrate safely into Limbe’s 14-member gorilla social group.

But another adult female, Brighter, showed interest and seemed willing to take on the role of caring for Bolo.

Abbey had other ideas, however.

“Very surprisingly, Abbey, who is not a dominant female, went up to Brighter and gently took Bolo off her and placed her on her chest,” said Felix Lankester, manager of the Limbe Wildlife Center. “What was surprising was that Brighter didn’t try to take Bolo back. It was obvious to everyone that Abbey was much more protective than Brighter ever was, and that was the kind of protection we were looking for.”

The Limbe staff had spent months patiently developing the relationship between Brighter and Bolo, and even separated the pair temporarily from the other gorillas in order to foster the bonds of care. But Abbey’s willingness to take responsibility for Bolo proved irresistible.

Although the gorillas at Limbe are placed on contraceptives in order to restrict breeding, the introduction of Bolo (pictured above with Abbey and another of the Taiping Four, Tinu) has spurred the group to begin behaving more as they would in the wild. The males have assumed roles of dominance and leadership, while the female serve as surrogate aunts, and play with Bolo whenever they get the chance.

“This gives Abbey and the other females a chance to experience aspects of motherhood, which is a really important thing for gorillas,” Lankester said.

“When they haven’t got that, they get bored and might display unnatural behavior. Having Bolo in the group is a very calming influence.”

Snatched from their mothers when they were just babies, the ‘Taiping Four’ gorillas were smuggled from the forests of the Cameroon and taken to a zoo in neighboring Nigeria. From there they became pawns in the murky world of the illegal trade in endangered species. As wild-caught animals they could not be traded legally, so forged documentation described them as “captive bred” allowing them to be sold to a zoo in Malaysia.

But the sudden arrival of four young gorillas on the international zoo scene was bound to raise suspicion, and it didn’t take long for animal welfare investigators to uncover and make public the illegality of their capture and export.

CITES regulations clearly state that, wherever possible, confiscated animals are to be returned to their native land, and so they did, thanks to IFAW’s supporters, the Taiping Four Gorillas arrived to their new home in Limbe, Cameroon on November 30, 2007.

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