Baby Gibbon Born
The new baby with its mother.
This is the second baby for mother Tango and father Daniel. According to the zoo, the pair have bonded very well and are making excellent parents, Tango is checking and caring for the new baby and Daniel is proudly watching over his little family.
The Siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus) is a tailless, arboreal, black furred gibbon native to the forests of Malaysia, Thailand and Sumatra. It can grow to twice the size of other gibbons, reaching one metre in height, and up to fourteen kilos in weight.
It is distinctive for two reasons. The first is that two fingers on each hand are fused together — hence the name syndactylus which comes from the Ancient Greek word united/fused. The second is the large "gular sac" (found in both male and female of the species), which is a throat pouch that can be inflated to the size of its head and allows these animals to make loud resonating calls or songs. You can hear the loud calls or singing at Twycross Zoo in the early morning normally around 9.00 am – 11.00 am. Most of the Siamang's calls are directed to their neighbours, they will also call to respond to disturbances and to defend their territory.
They normally live up to around thirty years of age in captivity and will live in family groups of up to six individuals. At Twycross Zoo they eat a variety of fruits and leaves.
A major threat to the Siamang is habitat loss due to plantation, forest fires, illegal logging, encroachment, and human development. The palm oil plantations have also removed large areas of the Siamang's habitat in the last four decades. Since 2002 over 100,000 square kilometres of palm oil have been planted which has replaced much of the rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Siamang originally used to live.
With Strangles Awareness Week just around the corner (5-11 May), vets are being encouraged to share a survey about the disease with their horse-owning clients.
