With only around 15,000 left in the wild, the Sumatran orangutan is considered critically endangered. The Toronto Zoo announced that for the first time in 15 years, one of their Sumatran orangutans is pregnant. The organization explained that the mother is named Sekalli, a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan and the father is a 15-year-old named Budi.
The Zoo introduced the pair in February and the pregnancy was confirmed in August. When orangutans get pregnant, they can be detected just like human pregnancies. They trained her to pee in a cup and would use over-the-counter pregnancy tests. Orangutan pregnancies are shorter than human pregnancies, so Sekalli is due in April.
The last orangutan birth to happen in the Toronto Zoo was back in 2006. The conservation status of this species was changed in 2017 to critically endangered when researchers could only locate 15,000 left. The Toronto Zoo CEO Dolf DeJong said “This pregnancy is an important contribution to a genetically healthy Sumatran orangutan population,”
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