Baby Gorilla

About 8:40 one morning last week, Warren Deane Thomas, a 26-year-old Ohio State University graduate student and employee of the Columbus Zoo, walked into the monkey house to feed the animals. When he reached the cage of Christina, a nine-year-old, 280-lb. gorilla, he found her squatting listlessly in a far corner, indifferent to the hard-boiled egg he held. Then he saw why: on the floor squirmed a baby gorilla--probably the first ever born in captivity.

The birth came as a surprise, since zoo officials knew that Christina was pregnant, but had little idea what a gorilla's gestation period is (in Christina's case it proved to be 259 days). Thomas dropped the egg and stepped into the cage. "I wasn't thinking of anything but the baby," he explained later. But Christina, who had probably given birth only three minutes earlier, was too dazed to attack him. She scurried into a retreat cage, and Thomas closed the door after her. Then he rushed with the baby to the zoo kitchen and removed the sac. He noticed that the baby was having difficulty breathing and began slapping her on the back. She caught her breath and lost it again. "I knew the strongest stimulant for respiration is carbon dioxide," Thomas said. "I started breathing into her mouth." He kept it up for 15 minutes. "I was all alone," he explains, "and knew that history was in the making, but I didn't have time to think about anything but keeping that baby alive." When he was becoming exhausted, the baby started to breathe.

Zoo attendants put her in an incubator and started feeding her a special baby formula. At week's end the baby (whose father is a 400-lb., 11-year-old gorilla named Baron) weighed in at 4 1/2 lbs., and was given a fair chance to survive if she weathered the first few days. If she lives, the happy zoo officials will conduct a city-wide contest to choose a name for her.

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