A Gibbon Virgin Gives Birth to Baby Boy at Nagasaki Zoo!

Zookeepers at Kujukushima Zoo and Botanical Garden in Nagasaki Prefecture have solved a two-year-old mystery: How did a female lar gibbon get pregnant while living in her own enclosure without a male present?

So pregnant that she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy in February 2021. The mom, named Momo, kept her son close and so zoo staff let them be, but they did surreptitiously collect hair and stool samples for DNA analysis in order to track down the dad, who turned out to be a 34-year-old agile gibbon named Itoh.

“It took us two years to figure it out because we couldn’t get close enough to collect samples—she was very protective of her child,” zoo superintendent Jun Yamano told VICE World News.

How did Itoh do it? Through a small hole in the wall, it turns out—a 9-millimeter (about a third of an inch) hole in a separating partition. Momo and Itoh take turns going on display in the mornings and afternoons, with their respective spaces separated by a partition intended to keep the apes from commingling. But life found a way and commingling commenced. Agile gibbon indeed.

Now that the issue, ahem, of paternity has been settled, the zoo hopes to move Itoh in with Momo and child. “They have to get used to each other first. But hopefully they live together as one family,” Yamano said.

The zoo has since replaced the perforated partition board with an impermeable barrier, or so they believe.

Photo credit: Kujukushima Zoo & Botanical Garden via Vice