In roughly a hundred years, the Detroit Zoo had seen exactly one gorilla born on its grounds. This month it saw its second: a healthy female western lowland gorilla, born to a mother named Tulivu, announced by the zoo on July 15 [1].
Western lowland gorillas are critically endangered - poaching, disease, and habitat loss have driven wild populations down for decades - which is why births like this one are managed across the continent rather than left to chance [1]. Tulivu's infant arrives under the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Gorilla Species Survival Plan, the coordinated breeding program that maintains a genetically healthy insurance population against the day the wild one needs it [1].
The infant does not yet have a name; she has a job already - one more member of a species that cannot afford to lose any, born healthy, to a first-century-of-the-zoo rarity that took a hundred years to happen twice [1].
