In his own circles, Kwan is undeniably something of an Adonis. Still a youth and a slender 300 pounds, he has long legs, strong arms, a washboard stomach and a handsome, unblemished face.
He came to Chicago with a task that some males might regard as enviable: to meet and mate with four females who had been without male companionship for some time.
Still, when the big moment came and he was ushered into a room with his intended brides, he met with a reception that ultimately had him sleeping on the simian equivalent of the couch.
The ladies–Helen, 40, Lenore, 35, Kumba, 28, and Kowali, 20– are a decidedly middle-age, sometimes libidinous and often ornery lot. They welcomed Kwan by biting, swatting and chasing him endlessly around the habitat they will share in the Lincoln Park Zoo Great Ape House.
The scuffles were so intense on Wednesday, in fact, that one of the female gorillas didn’t make the Thursday meeting because she needed stitches on a bitten thumb.
Nonethless, the keepers, who have been warily watching these goings on, so far are pleased with the outcome. They are hoping that Kwan, a 9-year-old lowland gorilla who arrived in March from the North Carolina Zoo in Ashboro, will become the first of a new generation of breeding males in their world-famous captive gorilla breeding facility.
It has been successful because its overseers learned a long time ago to let the gorillas live as they do in the wild, allowing them to conduct their affairs and settle their disputes in gorilla fashion.
“We don’t know in these introduction sessions if we’re going to see open wounds, broken bones or what,” said Dennis Pate, the zoo’s general curator. “It can get pretty rough, but we don’t like to interfere with the animals while they work things out on their own, unless it gets so bad that it seems like it could be fatal, with somebody unconscious on the floor.”
Kwan’s introduction so far, while looking nasty at times, has been marked by the kind of bullying on the part of the females that the keepers expected, resulting only in a few minor cuts and scrapes.
“He’s a newcomer in their house, and they’re demanding that he show them some respect,” said head gorilla keeper Cathy Maurer. She and other zoo officials have been monitoring the introduction, carried out in two stages on Wednesday and Thursday.
A lot rides on Kwan’s learning to take his place in his new home, which has had 45 gorilla babies since the first birth there in 1970, Kumba, one of Kwan’s intended mates.
Right now the zoo has only one other adult male, Frank, who is in his late 30s and in his declining years.
“He (Kwan) has to be our next `main man,’ ” said Kevin Bell, the zoo director. In the last two years, the zoo has shipped out two entire families to other zoos at the suggestion of officials of the gorilla species survival plan, who were looking to spread the genetic diversity of the 340 captive gorillas in North America.
Moving the two families–their dominant, breeding male leaders going with them–reduced the zoo’s gorilla numbers from more than 30 to 17.
Three of Kwan’s new mates, Helen, Lenore and Kowali, had been living with a magnificent silverback male named Gino until last summer, when he was moved with his younger wives and children to Disney World’s new Animal Kingdom zoo in Florida.
To Helen and Lenore, especially, being introduced to a new male is an old hat procedure. Through the years, they’ve been mated with a number of dominant, mature males, called “silverbacks” because of the way their backs turn gray as they age.
Kwan, while sexually mature (a late teenager in human years), is still a blackback youngster, six or seven years away from becoming the dominant ape he will become, turning gray and filling out by another 150 to 200 pounds. A neophyte who knows nothing about love, certainly he hasn’t stature yet to impress the new women in his life.
Having spent the last year without a man in their lives, however, his new women are expected to begin cozying up to Kwan in the next month or so, when they go into their monthly mating cycles. Whichever one gets into a romantic mood first will likely have the honor of showing Kwan, for the first time in his life, how he must carry out his husbandly duties.
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If that honor falls to Lenore, a no-nonsense grandma who lost her right paw to a bone infection a decade ago, that could be a rough experience too.
“Most of the time she is giving off signals to the male of the house to just stay out of her way and leave her alone,” Maurer said. “But when she is ready to mate, she can be a handful. I’ve seen her grab the guys by the ankles and throw them on the floor so she can have at them.”
Helen, too, is a determined lover, Maurer said, though Kumba, who had an ovary removed in surgery several years ago, seldom displays any interest in sex anymore. None of the three older females has had a baby in more than a decade and aren’t expected to conceive any more.
Later, officials plan to introduce other, younger females. But the real object in the initial marriage arrangement is Kowali, a four-time mother and one of the most fecund females in the ape house.
“We want to wait a few months before we let her get pregnant,” Maurer said, “so she’s on birth control right now. I have no doubt, however, that she’ll be pregnant as soon as we let her.”
Captive gorilla breeding wasn’t always so easy. For more than a hundred years zoos paired them off two-by-two, unsuccessfully trying to mate them according to human-imposed social patterns.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Lincoln Park began listening closely to pioneering field researchers like George Schaller and Dian Fossey, who studied gorilla society in the wild.
Taking their cues from that research, the zoo formed its gorillas into more natural groupings of a dominant, breeding male who leads a harem of several adult females and their offspring. But gorilla society, by human standards, can at times be harsh.
Keepers tried to prepare the animals for the introduction by letting them live in adjoining habitats since March so that they could see each other and get used to each other’s behaviors.
Kwan, however, arrived here with a serious learning deficit. He was reared in a zoo that offered much more horizontal floor space and less vertical space than Lincoln Park.
“When he got here, he didn’t know how to climb,” Maurer said. “That had us concerned, because we knew the ladies would be chasing him all over the place during the introduction, and we didn’t want him scrambling around 20 feet above the floor and losing his balance.”
So, from March until this week, he lived on his own, learning how to scale the trees and swing on the ropes in the habitats.
Pate said Kwan has tolerated the introductory hazing by the females pretty well and expects it to lessen day by day over the next few weeks.
“He’s taking the smart approach and not being too aggressive,” Pate said. “All the girls are sticking together and keeping him on his toes. He isn’t going to sleep well for a few days, having to keep an eye out for four animals, while they only have to watch out for one.”