Name: Jade
Sex: Female
Born: 1984
Favorite food: Anything salty (peanuts, crackers—also bugs and lizards)
Favorite activity: Flirting with neighboring males.

Jade, her mate Palu-Palu, and their son Maui came to IPPL in March 1996. They were rescued from the Maui Zoo, which was being closed due to its violations of the Animal Welfare Act. The zoo had had several run-ins with the U.S. Department of Agriculture over its sub-standard animal housing. The three gibbons came to IPPL just before the 1996 Members’ Meeting, which is held every two years on the IPPL grounds. They arrived with several boxes of pineapples as their luggage!

An IPPL member in Hawaii wrote to us at the time that she remembered when Maui was born, Jade “cared for him carefully, and his father was attentive all through his growing up.” Jade had previously joined Palu-Palu from the Honolulu Zoo, but we don’t know if she had had any other offspring.

When Maui became an adult, we took him from his parents and placed him with another female, so that he could have a normal, mature relationship. Jade and Palu-Palu are still together.

Jade, is a good-sized, assertive female. Some of our gibbons are suspicious when we introduce novel items into their enclosures, but not Jade. She loves it when we put a large container filled with hay and hidden goodies into her outside area; she’ll eagerly rummage around in it for things like boiled eggs, raisins, and peanuts.

She can also be a terrible flirt. Although gibbons in the wild are territorial and monogamous (and they certainly don’t form social groups like gorillas, chimpanzees, or bonobos), they have occasionally been observed to “stray”! Jade has been seen to strut her stuff for a couple of her bachelor male gibbon neighbors, first for Gus, and lately for Gibby! She’ll get as close to them as her aerial runway will allow, lie on her back with her legs in the air, and look at them longingly. The guys hardly seem to know how to react. Maybe Jade’s just trying to make her mate jealous. Poor Palu-Palu!