Zoo announces big news: Pregnant elephant
The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium has announced a huge development.
Phoebe, the zoo’s 31-yearold Asian elephant, is pregnant, with the calf due in December. This will be the matriarch’s fourth time as a mother, and the third calf to be born at the Columbus Zoo.
The announcement was made to coincide with World Elephant Day — to help preserve the creatures in the wild — on Sunday.
To celebrate Mom’s news, Columbus zoo staff members set up a “Big Brother in Training” sign in the enclosure for Beco, the 9-year-old male who is Phoebe’s most recent calf.
When the doors were opened for Beco and Phoebe to start the pregnancyreveal party, Phoebe went directly to the sign and stomped on it. A little later, she began to eat the pink and blue streamers hanging from the enclosure’s tree trunks.
It took longer for the two to notice the pink and blue piñata, full of popcorn, dangling from a chain above. That eventually suffered the same fate. Asian elephant Phoebe is expecting a calf in December, the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium has announced. It will be her fourth calf, with three born at the Columbus Zoo. Elephant pregnancies last about 22 months.
Asian elephants’ gestation period is around 22 months, so Phoebe has been carrying the baby for quite a while. Asian elephants are between 200 and 300 pounds at birth and stand about 3 feet tall.
A pregnancy isn’t suspected until an elephant has skipped two menstrual cycles, which can be around
100 days, said Adam Felts, curator of the zoo’s Heart of Africa and Asia Quest exhibits. Now they’ve seen the developing calf through ultrasound imaging on Phoebe’s belly. That’s done with a wand, just as a technician would perform it on a human mother-to-be.
Zoo officials are not
certain whether the father of Phoebe’s current pregnancy is their own Hank or the product of artificial insemination from a bull at another zoo. After the baby is born, a DNA test will be done to figure out paternity.
“Boy or girl? What do you want?” the zoo’s president and chief executive officer, Tom Stalf, asked Felts during the announcement. “I want a girl,” Felts said. This addition will increase the herd at the Columbus Zoo’s Asia Quest exhibit to seven: Connie, Hank, Rudy, Sunny, Beco, Phoebe and the baby. Sisters Rudy and Sunny joined in 2016 from the Ringling Bros. circus. “People think they were mistreated; they actually were pampered,” said Steven McClung, a docent in Asia Quest. “It took some adjusting to the herd.”
Phoebe’s calf Bodhi was born in Columbus in 2004 and currently resides at the Denver Zoo. Her first calf, George, was born in 1999 in Canada.
According to the zoo, Asian elephants are listed as endangered in their native southern and southeastern Asia. Their numbers are shrinking due to factors that include habitat loss and degradation and poaching.
The World Elephant Day organization estimates there are fewer than 40,000 Asian elephants and fewer than 400,000 African elephants remaining worldwide.