Cincinnati Zoo gorilla Gladys becomes first time mom after birth of healthy baby

The new bouncing, soon-to-be-climbing, baby boy is the 51st gorilla born at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden.

“The ZVOs reported signs of labor throughout the early hours on Saturday morning and she was in active labor when I arrived at 5:30 a.m.,” said Ashley Ashcraft, Cincinnati Zoo’s head gorilla keeper. “A few hours later, keepers had the honor of quietly observing her birth.”

Gladys came to the Cincinnati Zoo from the Gladys Porter Zoo when she herself was a baby, because her mother’s maternal instincts did not kick in, the zoo said. As a result, Gladys needed human surrogates and a potential surrogate gorilla mother; the Cincinnati Zoo had both available on hand, which is why Gladys came to live in the Queen City.

Despite that, Ashcraft said Gladys has not shown any signs of repeating her own mom’s behavior.

“She has been very attentive to the baby and is doing all the right things,” said Ashcraft. “We are so proud of her.”

The zoo posted a video of Gladys cradling her new son gently while he napped in her arms.

The baby’s father, 23-year-old silverback gorilla Mbeli, is also a first-time parent, according to the zoo. So far, he has done a great job leading the family group and, while he will be fairly hands off with his new bundle of joy, he will continue to provide protection for Gladys and the baby within the social group, the zoo said.

Gladys and her son are bonding behind the scenes for the time being, while the keeper team discusses baby names and considers suggestions from the public. Name suggestions can be submitted on the zoo’s social media accounts.

In the meantime, visitors can still see other gorillas at Gorilla World during regular zoo hours.

Gladys and her baby are Western lowland gorillas, which are considered critically endangered in the wild. The Cincinnati Zoo said there are fewer than 175,000 individual Western lowland gorillas in the wild. There are around 765 gorillas in zoos worldwide, including roughly 360 managed by the Gorilla SSP.

Gladys is no stranger to being in the spotlight.

In 2024, she got into a scuffle with two other female gorillas in her troop that resulted in a broken arm that required surgery. After she went through that surgery, Gladys put her keepers through another conundrum: How to keep one of the world’s strongest animals in a cast.

A photo posted to the zoo’s website not long after the injury showed her arm in a regular cast, already torn in places.

“Gladys is naturally curious about her new cast and she doesn’t fully understand the need to preserve it for her recovery,” said Dr. Mike Wenninger, Cincinnati Zoo’s director of animal health, in April 2024. “So, we turned to our friends at GE (Additive) to help us create a sturdier cast.”

The result was a 3D-printed titanium cast made of the same materials as the screws and plates put into her arm during surgery. Shannon Morman, GE Additive’s advanced lead engineer, said the cast took around 65 hours to print and was delivered less than a week after the zoo’s request.