Name: Dianne (named after long-time IPPL board member Dianne   Taylor-Snow)
Sex: Female
Born: 1995
Favorite food: Honeydew—though she and Robbie always go for their baked sweet potatoes first if they’re on the breakfast menu; if Robbie makes the mistake of taking the larger of the two potatoes, she will take it away from him!
Favorite activity: Making threatening faces at her female neighbors.

Dianne is one of our shyer gibbons. She is a daughter of IPPL’s own Arun Rangsi and Shanti, so she spent her young life living in a normal gibbon family with her parents and siblings. Probably as a result, she is not as interested in interacting with humans but is quite happy to be the companion of handsome Robbie; the two of them are never far apart.

Also as a result, she is very interested in doing a normal wild gibbon behavior: defending her territory from neighboring females. Of course, we do not allow our adult gibbon pairs to come into physical contact with each other (since that would certainly lead to fighting), but Dianne likes to make sure that her neighbors know she is not to be messed with: she will sit next to Robbie in their wire mesh aerial runway and stare meaningfully at E.T. and her mate Donny, or she will make aggressive open-mouthed threat faces at Jade.

In the wild, gibbons are almost entirely arboreal. Dianne prefers the same environment: she and Robbie like to hang out in the topmost parts of their outdoor enclosure, a good 15 feet or more off the ground.