Name: Gibby
Sex: Male
Born: Wild-caught around 1962
Favorite food: Dots (OK, that’s not a food, but these gum drops have been his favorites for years; he also enjoys nectarines and peaches).
Favorite activity: Munching on the grapevines growing around his enclosure.

Gibby had been used for locomotion experiments at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was trained to run on a treadmill wearing a harness while measurements of his muscle movements were taken.

Fortunately for him, this meant that the worst medical intervention he was exposed to was anesthesia. Also, he was kept in a pretty large cage (for a lab animal) so that he could exercise and keep his muscles toned. He had even been paired with females (first Gabby, then Georgia). But there was little enrichment, and as he grew older he found the studies increasingly stressful. Gibby was transferred to a Texas sanctuary in 2003 when the lab decided to get rid of its gibbons. Sadly, Gibby’s long-time mate Georgia was sent off to a zoo.

We didn’t know too much about Gibby when he arrived at IPPL in 2007 from his former sanctuary home, which was experiencing difficulties at the time. But we learned a lot more when his former lab caregiver, Marianne Crisci, read about him in IPPL News. She gave us a call and said that she had worked with Gibby for eight years at the lab, starting in 1988. A friend of hers who started at the lab in 1977 said Gibby was there even then; he had come to Stony Brook from another lab in New York. In December 2011 we learned from yet another former caregiver that, when he was a baby, Gibby had been bought by a scientist at Hofstra University—in 1962!

Marianne told us that Gibby loved women but couldn’t stand men—which is true to this day: all his favorite people are female (every morning he hugs and “talks” to our senior caregiver Donetta). Marianne said that Gibby would become agitated if a man entered his room. Once Marianne even saw Gibby get loose and chase after a male visitor. She also told us about Gibby’s fondness for Dots! She and Gibby had a lovely reunion at IPPL in April 2010, 14 years after she left the lab.

In March 2012, we moved Gibby out of a Gibbon House located near the front of the IPPL property to a roomier enclosure farther back. Although Gibby had enjoyed his role as IPPL’s unofficial greeter, we thought he’d like using Michael’s old space. (We’d recently paired Michael with Cathy, so Michael had no more need of his “bachelor digs.”) Michael’s outdoor enclosure is covered with grapevines that produce tender leaves in the spring and yummy muscadine grapes in the summer. An added bonus: lovely Tong, a lively single female, lives nearby!