“That initial twenty-four hours, we had keepers staying the entirety of the night,” Malinsky said. Calaya is “a gorilla’s gorilla.” Some gorillas in zoos like to ham it up for their caretakers, to win their approval and treats others, like Calaya, are more focussed on the dynamics in their own troop. “A human would probably be on bed rest, but we couldn’t really tell her to lie down,” Malinsky said. In the days after her water broke, since there had been no progression, Calaya was given amoxicillin and azithromycin, to prevent infection. “We did what the human ob-gyn said she would do with one of her patients in the same situation,” Malinsky said. Now, in her second pregnancy, though her amniotic sac had ruptured, she had not gone into labor. During Calaya’s first pregnancy and delivery, five years earlier, she had gathered fabric scraps from other parts of the enclosure, and wrapped them around her head and abdomen this appeared to be an effective makeshift pain-management strategy. Yet the goal for a gorilla birth in a contemporary zoo is to make no intervention at all. What if the mother died during birth? What if there were a need for a C-section? How would they speak to the media if the baby were unwell? It mapped out all the forking paths of how things might go wrong. “We came up with a day-by-day plan,” Malinsky told me.Įven before Calaya’s water broke, the zoo had written up a detailed birth plan.
Becky Malinsky-the zoo’s curator of primates-and her team consulted veterinarians, both in-house and external, and an ob-gyn who works with humans. In fact, it was amniotic fluid: Calaya, a twenty-year-old western lowland gorilla, was an expectant mother. In early May, a zookeeper at the Smithsonian National Zoo was walking underneath the gorilla enclosure when she saw a deluge of what looked like water. Photograph courtesy Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute
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