For decades after people first tried to keep gorillas in captivity, any gorilla’s path from the forest to the zoo was soaked in blood. As NATURE’s Snowflake: The White Gorilla shows, the animals had to be captured in the wild when they were young — before they grew too big and powerful to handle. Hunters would first have to kill the baby’s parents and sometimes its entire family.

This gruesome situation began to change in 1956 when a zoo in Columbus, Ohio became home to the first gorilla ever born and raised in captivity. Her name is Colo, and “she almost didn’t make it,” says Jeffrey Lyttle, author of Gorillas In Our Midst, a book about the Columbus Zoo gorillas.

“At the time, the zookeepers knew that Colo’s [mother] was pregnant, but nobody knew the gestation period of a gorilla,” Lyttle recalls. “They thought it was nine months, like humans, but it turns out it is closer to eight and a half months. So they weren’t expecting the birth. A vet named Warren Thomas was making his morning rounds when he discovered Colo, in her amniotic sack, lying on the concrete floor of her mother’s cage. He reached in, tore open the sack, and began giving Colo mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

Luckily, the little gorilla lived. “It was huge national news,” says Lyttle. But zookeepers believed that Colo’s mother wasn’t up to the task of raising her baby. They were probably right, since many captive gorillas never had a chance to learn parenting skills from their own parents in the wild. “So Columbus built a special nursery for her,” Lyttle explains. “Zoo visitation went through the roof. They would dress Colo up for the holidays — put her in an Easter bonnet and fancy dresses. Some people say she still likes to wear her food dish as a hat because she spent so much of her infancy wearing hats.”

A dozen years later, Colo gave birth to her first offspring, and she has since had several more; in NATURE’s Snowflake, viewers get to meet Dotty, Colo’s great-granddaughter.

Much has changed in the years between Colo’s and Dotty’s births. More and more, captive gorilla babies are being raised by their own mothers as zookeepers learn how to re-create more natural conditions. In cases where the mother still may not be able to handle the job, they have developed sophisticated surrogate parenting programs, where the babies spend a short time with human caregivers and then are quickly given to other gorillas to raise.

In Snowflake, Dotty meets her surrogate parents for the first time. It’s a tense moment — some surrogate parents won’t accept and care for their new offspring. Luckily, Dotty was accepted and is doing fine.

“Surrogacy has been extremely successful,” says Lyttle. “It was risky at first. These are very valuable animals, and there were these ideas that introducing an infant into a troop [a clan-like group of gorillas] could provoke violence. But the keepers believed surrogacy would work, and it has. It really shows how much our ignorance about gorilla social life has changed.”

Indeed, surrogacy has helped end much of the trade in wild gorillas. Today, about half of all gorillas that live in captivity are like Dotty — born and raised in a zoo, not torn from their families in the wild.

In 1967, local villagers in Africa’s Equitorial Guinea captured a remarkable baby gorilla. This young male was unlike any gorilla the villagers had seen before; instead of the thick brown fur of most gorillas, this baby had a coat of pure white. Through a series of fortunate circumstances, the rare white gorilla ended up at the Barcelona Zoo, where he became an international star. He was given the Spanish name Copito de Nieve and the English name Snowflake.

NATURE’s Snowflake: The White Gorilla tells the story of this remarkable animal, from his loving upbringing by humans to his eventual death from skin cancer in 2003. It also tracks the revolutionary changes in our understanding of how best to care for gorillas that have taken place during Snowflake’s lifetime.

Captive gorillas were once confined to solitary cells and fed meat. Today, some zoos spend millions constructing environments that are more in keeping with gorillas’ natural habitats, where the animals can live in groups as they do in the wild. We now know that gorillas are vegetarians and have adapted feeding practices accordingly. Since 1956, when the first baby gorilla was born in captivity at an Ohio zoo, zoos have developed new and better ways to nurture gorilla families.

Let NATURE’s Snowflake: The White Gorilla take you on a fascinating excursion into this remarkable world and introduce you to history’s only known albino gorilla.

Online content for Snowflake: The White Gorilla was originally posted February 2005.

The moment Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns saw the three orphans in a Russian zoo, they knew what they had to do.

It was May, 1997, and the couple was visiting the animal park in Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka’s biggest city. There, in a cage, were three female grizzly cubs, recently orphaned when a hunter accidentally killed their mother. “The director of the zoo made it very clear to us that there was a death sentence on [the cubs'] heads,” the couple recall in a diary posted on their Web site. “The zoo had no money to feed them and visitors were throwing food in to them as they played behind the iron bars.”

In a moment, the cubs had “won their hearts,” the pair says. That night “we had a carrying box built for their transport” back to their wilderness cabin. Their plan: reintroduce the cubs into the wild, teaching them the basic skills they would need to survive. In this case, however, there was no manual for the new parents to follow on how to bring up the babies. They would literally be making it up as they went along. As Walking with Giants shows, however, the new family got along just fine. Russell and Enns were careful not to get the cubs, named Chico, Biscuit, and Rosie, too used to humans, instead teaching them to forage on their own and encouraging them to romp and swim independently. They did, however, keep them inside a fenced pen for some time, to protect them from adult bears who might kill the youngsters. By the fall of 1997, however, the bears had grown enough to be ready to spend the winter sleeping — and Charlie watched as they began to build a den. (Despite popular belief, bears do not actually hibernate, which involves a reduced body temperature and pulse rate; rather, they enter winter dormancy, a deep sleep from which they can be awakened, even moving to a new location if they are disturbed.)

The following spring, in 1998, “Charlie met the cubs not long after they came out of their den,” Enns recalls. And by that summer, “we were teaching our cubs to dive for dead fish. We start out in about four feet of water, see a fish on the bottom, and then chuck a rock into the pool and call the cubs over to look down in the water. One of the cubs got right in.”  The couple hopes to find their cubs safe and sound for many years to come. “We are proud of the fact that our cubs are still together,” Enns notes, especially since many experts doubted the pair could successfully reintroduce the animals into the wild. “Eventually,” she says, “we hope to see our cubs have cubs of their own,” which could happen when the bears are four or five years old.

What the future holds for the cubs and Kamchatka’s other grizzlies, however, is uncertain. The collapse of Russia’s economy has crippled many conservation and anti-poaching efforts, leaving the bears more exposed than ever to those who would kill the magnificent creatures for their skin, innards, or bones, body parts that many people believe hold magical or medicinal powers. Luckily, the economic woes have also hampered the poachers, who are having a harder time buying the fuel and equipment they need to invade the bear’s isolated wilderness territory.

Modern Zoos

It’s not Australia, but koalas feel at home. If you are the sort of person who complains about overly large zoo exhibits that allow animals to stray from the most prominent viewing areas, you should take a closer look at what these wildlife parks are trying to accomplish. As “Gorilla Tropics,” “Polar Bear Plunge,” and other San Diego Zoo areas demonstrate in Animal Attractions, the zoo is not a “living museum,” but a place where animals should feel at home. Today, zoos combine educational exhibit areas with backstage research areas where zoologists study the animals under their care.

Visitors are captivated by animals at the zoo. During the latter part of the 20th century, zoos began to provide a new experience for visitors by replacing the iron bars and concrete walls of cages with protective moats, bigger animal areas, and recreated tropical rainforests. The San Diego Zoo, founded in 1916, helped pioneer this shift.

Zoos used to keep all animals in cages. In 1868, Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo was reportedly the first zoo in the United States to open its gates to the public, followed closely by the Philadelphia Zoo and New York’s Central Park Zoo. These parks filled their cages with wild-caught animals. As the burgeoning populations and growing industries of the 20th century began decimating wild habitats, zoos took on the role of housing remnants of once-thriving animal populations.

Then in 1907, Carl Hagenbeck, of the Tierpark in Hamburg, Germany, thought of using moats rather than bars to enclose animals, but this trend took more than a few years to catch on. Dr. Harry Wegeforth, founder of the San Diego Zoo, was determined to create moated exhibits, and in 1922, the first lion area opened, free of any enclosing wires. At first, visitors were afraid that the lions would escape and attack them.

Today, a walk through the Bronx Zoo’s “Wild African Plains” exhibit shows how this technique offers the public a seamless view of animals coexisting, as if side by side in the wild. The African antelope and its predator, the lion, appear to be in the same field, when in fact they are separated by a deep, wide gully. This type of gap deters the lions from hunting the antelope — not to mention hunting the visiting humans

An even better simulation of the safari experience takes place at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Here, photo caravans transport tourists through a pasture of giraffes, zebra, ostriches, rhinos, and many other species visitors might have had to travel to Africa or Asia to see in the wild. But unlike a real safari, here visitors may safely feed the animals, which have been tamed through repeated human interaction and, in fact, seem to look forward to visits. This 2,200-acre park is home to more than 2,500 animals.

But since that kind of acreage is oftentimes not available, architects struggle to make exhibit areas spacious and interesting to their inhabitants and visitors. Since the 1960s, zoo horticulturists have built naturalistic habitats that reach new levels of creativity. A big issue is that of “psychological space” — the idea that the animal should feel that it is actually in the wild. Examine the case of the San Diego Zoo’s “Polar Bear Plunge,” featured in the NATURE program, which took two years and seven million dollars to build.

There is no way a zoo near a major city can approximate the vast distances of the Arctic. So, instead, the zoo architects who designed “Polar Bear Plunge” tried to give the bears a stimulating, varied environment that would prevent them from becoming bored. Zoo keepers provide toys and puzzles (such as fish stuffed into a column of ice for the bears to dig out), slides, pools, and streams, all in an effort to make the polar bears feel at home.

But designers must also keep the safety of the public in mind. Polar bears are, after all, powerful, 10-foot-tall wild animals capable of causing serious harm to people. The zoo walled the bears behind solid concrete and constructed a thick glass barrier, so visitors could watch the bears underwater and feel that they were getting as close to them as possible. Interestingly, they found out that the bears seem to be as fascinated by the public as the public is by them.

According to Fred Beiner, president of the Association of Zoological Horticulture, designers must tackle issues of insect control, drainage, plant toxicity, and durability, and also must depict the animal’s natural habitat accurately and provide it with an interesting environment. Most importantly, he states, a good zoo exhibit should combine these elements with a clear view of the animals for the public and educational signs that describe what they see.

Nature vs. Nurture

During the 20th century, as humans have encroached more and more on animals’ territory, zoos have come to be more than just places to view wild animals. They have become breeding facilities, wild animal hospitals, and research centers. As you see in Animal Attractions: Amazing Tales from the San Diego Zoo, a lot goes on behind the scenes, away from the ordinary visitor. And much of this activity is focused on a single goal: trying to save species from extinction.

The thought behind this idea is that as humans have spread across the globe, the breeding, migratory, and behavior patterns of wild animals have been forever changed. Since we cannot put the world back the way it was, scientists reason, we must try to invent new ways to deal with the problem of endangered animals, some of whose ranks have dwindled to the double — or even single — digits.

The Species Survival Plan (SSP) is sponsored by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA). The plan’s aim is to help “ensure the survival of selected wildlife species” through cooperative captive-breeding and training programs. Zoos share animals with other zoos, which keeps gene pools diverse as well as increasing the chances of conception in the event that a particular male and female don’t seem to have the right “chemistry.”

The Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species at the San Diego Zoo is headquarters for the SSP of the giant panda. If the resident pandas are not on exhibit at the zoo, they are probably under the scrutinizing eye of researchers studying their behavior. This program, headed by scientist Dr. Don Lindburg, began in 1987 as a long-distance collaboration with Chinese scientists at the Woolong Giant Panda Conservation Centre in Sichuan Province, China. This rare species faces the double threat of habitat fragmentation and illegal hunting, even though the latter carries the steep penalty of execution in China. Today, an estimated 1,000 pandas survive in the remote bamboo forest areas of the Qionlai Mountains.

In September, 1996, Lindburg’s team became foster keepers for a 15-year-old rescued male named Shi Shi and a six-year-old captive-born female named Bai Yun, both on loan from Woolong. The pair was introduced in February, 1997, in the hopes that when Bai Yun was ready to mate, Shi Shi would accept her.

They noticed each other, and it was not friendly, but it was not aggressive either,” describes Lindburg of the pandas’ first meeting. “It is sort of what you would expect from a solitary animal.” Wild pandas are rarely found in pairs, unless a mother is nursing a youngster or a couple is about to copulate. To put the pandas “in the mood,” Lindburg rotated them in each other’s play spaces, recording their reactions to various aromas placed in the environment. He eventually put the pair together.

“What happened was that the female became very solicitous,” says Lindburg. “Unfortunately, the male basically ignored her, and then responded to all of her overtures in an unfriendly manner.” Shi Shi growled, chased Bai Yun away, and swatted at her.

This means the researchers will have to wait a whole year to run the process all over again: females receive males only once a year for two or three days, attracting them with a “panda perfume” in the form of scent markings on trees or the ground. Scientists believe that this method is one of the main reasons pandas face extinction: their habitats, once solid swaths of forest, have been split up by a sprawling human population. Now pandas cannot find each other during the crucial one to two days when the female is in season.

Meanwhile, Lindburg and his colleagues are studying Bai Yun and Shi Shi intensely, hoping that their behavior will give researchers a clue as to how to boost the falling population of pandas in the wild.

Update: On Auguest 21, 1999, Shi Shi gave birth to Hua Mei, the first giant panda born in the Western Hemisphere since 1990. On February 11, 2000, visitors to the San Diego Zoo were able to get a glimpse of the baby panda.

Animal Medicine

Some of the most gripping scenes in the NATURE program Animal Attractions show the drama of veterinary medicine at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park. Animal health care is an important part of the zoo’s mission, and staff members pay daily “house calls” to residents. Whether an infant gorilla is struggling for life, a cheetah is giving birth to a premature litter, or a white rhino is receiving hormone therapy, every creature’s case is taken very seriously in the zoo’s “animal E.R.”

Imani, a western lowland gorilla born at the zoo in 1997, arrived in the intensive care unit within 72 hours of her birth. The two-pound infant was weak and tiny, less than half the weight of a normal newborn gorilla. In addition, her blood showed dangerously high levels of bilirubin, a toxin that can cause brain damage.

Imani was bottle-fed, given ultraviolet light treatments to flush the bilirubin from her system, and watched as carefully as any human preemie. For days, veterinarians held their breaths: Would Imani make it? Luckily, they were able to stabilize the tiny primate, who grew to be a healthy toddler. When she joined the others in the zoo’s “Gorilla Tropics”, she was adopted by Alvila, an older female, and welcomed to the family.

A few months after Imani’s successful recovery, a cheetah went into labor. The mother had lost her previous litter, so zoo veterinarians decided to perform surgery to remove the four cubs inside her womb. The cheetah was put under anesthesia in preparation for her Caesarian section.

One by one, veterinarian Dr. James Oosterhuis drew out the tiny cubs from the mother’s open belly and cleaned off the protective sacs that held them. But something was wrong: the cubs were not breathing. Four veterinarians immediately began blowing baby-size breaths into the infants’ mouths and massaging their floppy bodies to stimulate their organs until the newborns began to squeal. The infants were placed directly into the incubator to gain strength. Sadly, the cubs’ luck did not hold. Too weak to withstand infection, the cubs died within the week. But Oosterhuis is hopeful that next time, the mother cheetah will be able to give birth successfully.

The northern white rhinoceros is in terrible danger of extinction: only about 30 remain in the world. The San Diego Wild Animal Park introduced Nola, a female who had never borne offspring, to Angie, a male who had travelled all the way from a zoo in Sudan. The veterinarians hoped he would become her mate. But at the relatively old age of 25, Nola was a tough customer.

Fierce and aggressive, she repelled Angie’s overtures, actually bowling him over when he tried to get to know her better. Hormone therapy brought Nola into heat, but did nothing about her continued aggression. Wild Animal Park workers knew something drastic had to be done. A decision was made to saw off her horn in the hopes that without it, Nola might be more receptive — and less dangerous — to Angie. After anesthetizing Nola for the procedure, the veterinarians took the opportunity to give her an examination — a difficult feat to manage when a beast weighing almost two tons is awake and less than cooperative. They trimmed Nola’s hooves, checked her eyes and ears, and monitored her vital signs.

Then they removed the horn. Rhino horns are made mostly of keratin, the same material as human fingernails, and sawing one off is a painless exercise. It is also temporary: Nola’s horn would eventually grow back.

Meanwhile, once the horn was cut off, Angie and Nola mated several times, although Nola has yet to become pregnant. The veterinarians at the San Diego Wild Animal Park continue to observe the rhinos’ behavior carefully, knowing that a baby rhino would be a big step towards ensuring the survival of this dwindling species. And every day, the veterinarians remain ready for animal medical emergencies, aware that the lives of these creatures are in their hands.

NATURE takes you an a whirlwind tour of the animal kingdom as we explore the World-Famous San Diego Zoo and Animal Park.

Every animal has a story…and so does the staff at the San Diego Zoo. NATURE’s presentation of Animal Attractions: Amazing Tales from the San Diego Zoo invites you to look through the eyes of those who work behind the scenes, making sure every animal is properly cared and provided for.

From tiny Imani, a prematurely born and desperately ill gorilla baby, to fiercely independent and aggressive Nola, a 25-year-old northern white rhinoceros, the animals at the Zoo have all experienced the nurturing care of its deeply involved staff. Involved not only in the individual animals’ lives, but in ensuring the continued survival of the Earth’s most endangered species, such as the giant panda and the California condor. Whether it means finding out the secret to encouraging Bai Yun and Shi Shi (the only giant panda pair on the continent) to mate, or introducing dramatic procedures into the relationship between male and female white rhinos, those who keep the Zoo running are determined to keep these populations alive and healthy.

Get caught up in the drama of veterinary medicine at the Zoo, celebrate each triumph and mourn each loss, all against the backdrop of life in the practically wild.

To order a copy of Animal Attractions: Amazing Tales from the San Diego Zoo, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Animal Attractions: Amazing Tales from the San Diego Zoo was originally posted February 2000.