Great ape approaches a grand age

In his 50 years, Keo the chimp has learned a thing or two and seen Lincoln Park Zoo grow too

By William Mullen - wmullen@tribune.com - Tribune reporter

June 11, 2008

Like the great elder statesman that he is, one of the two oldest male zoo chimpanzees in North America spent time affably greeting old friends and other visitors during a rare public appearance Wednesday at Lincoln Park Zoo.

The chimp named Keo usually lives behind the scenes in a non-public area of the Regenstein Center for African Apes, ceding the spotlight to the zoo's second, younger chimp troop. But in honor of his 50th birthday June 26, the zoo this week put Keo back on public exhibit with the three females in his group.

Keo's life at Lincoln Park during the last 49 years has made the chimp a walking history of zoos and the way they've changed in mission and in attitude, said Steve Ross, the zoo's supervisor of behavioral and cognitive research.

Born in Africa, Keo was taken from the wild as a year-old infant to Lincoln Park. There, he was raised by humans. Today, importing wild chimps is illegal, and most chimps born in zoos are raised by other chimps.

Much of Keo's childhood was spent in the children's zoo, where he was called upon to wear a hat and preside over pretend tea parties, once a favorite for zoo publicity photos. In his old age, Keo was the first ape in Lincoln Park trained to use a touch-screen computer as a part of cognitive experiments Ross launched three years ago.

"He has gone from tea parties to touch-screen computers," Ross said. "In the 49 years he has been here, he has witnessed incredible changes in how zoos operate and care for their animals."

Auspicious timing

Keo came to Lincoln Park a year before primatologist Jane Goodall began her groundbreaking wild chimpanzee field studies at Gombe in Tanzania.

"Before World War II, zoos were largely just menageries, collections of animals considered as oddities," said Steve Thompson, vice president of conservation programs at the zoo. "After the war, zoos began doing a little research on the biology and natural history of their animals."

From the 1960s to the present, zoos gradually changed from mere displayers of animals to institutions active in research and education. In 1989, Thompson was the first full-time scientist and conservationist hired by Lincoln Park. That has since snowballed to one of the largest scientific and conservation staffs in the zoo world, including 32 specialists.

When Keo left the children's zoo, his first adult housing was in the old primate house, in a small, sterile, jail-like cage. That improved considerably in the 1970s when the zoo opened the circular great ape house, which had larger spaces with platforms and lots of ropes for climbing and roosting.

"It was a very good building in many respects, but it had some drawbacks," Ross said. There was no outdoor yard, for example, and the chimps had few places to withdraw from human observation.

Keo was a star attraction of that ape house—a showoff who hooted, screamed and delighted visitors by pounding on and tossing around huge rubber tubs in front of the public windows. In fact, Ross said, he was probably reacting to people on the other side of the glass that he found possibly threatening to him and his females.

In the new ape house, each habitat, including the off-view one Keo usually lives in, has a large, grassy outdoor yard and plenty of privacy.

Story courtesy of John Goodall. Thank you John.