"Life Finds a Way"

For those of you who haven't seen this story, a chimp at a Louisiana animal sanctuary has just had a baby, even though all of the male chimpanzees there have had vasectomies.

This happens to people, too; I know someone whose husband had had a vasectomy years before who discovered that she was pregnant. You can imagine the relationship strain there! When the guy went in for testing, it turned out that his body had healed itself from the results of the surgery -- sometimes the tubes mend themselves, and sometimes a third one grows -- and he had a full sperm count. (Their little girl's about four now, and the three of them are very happy.) I'm betting something similar happened to one of the male chimps.

I understand that the sanctuary wants to keep their population stable, but since wild chimps are endangered, another baby chimp in the world is a very happy thing. The story's especially satisfying since the chimps in this sanctuary are retired lab animals. Here are some quotations from a spokeswoman for the sanctuary (the mom is Teresa, and the baby's Tracy):

"This really shows that no matter what precautions you take, life finds a way," Ms Brent said. [. . . ]

"Tracy is one of the few chimpanzees born into an environment where she will be able to learn natural behaviours such as foraging, climbing trees and nesting from a group of wild-born chimpanzees . . . . This is a rare opportunity for Teresa to teach Tracy the skills she learned from her own mother in Africa so long ago."

Welcome to the world, baby Tracy!