Ape Twins

Mrs. Ovila Dionne was the thirty-first human mother known to have borne quintuplets (see p. 39). At Yale's 200-acre Anthropoid Experiment Station in Orange Park, Fla. last week was another mother who, with a record unique in biological annals, might well have been jealous of the hullabaloo over the Canadian woman and her offspring. Her name is Mona and she is a 21-year-old chimpanzee. At Orange Park on June 26, 1933, she gave birth to fraternal twins, male & female. The father was an 11-year-old brought from Africa by a sailor. Mona had spent 15 years on Mme Rosalia Abreu's famed ape farm in Havana, was already mother of three. One of her daughters was the first chimpanzee of dated birth and known parentage to mature sexually (at the age of eight) in captivity.

Single great ape births in captivity are rare. As far as Robert Mearns Yerkes, Yale professor of psychobiology and director of the Experiment Station, can discover from records, Mona is the first great ape of any kind ever known to produce more than one baby at a time.* He has seen chimpanzee ''twins'' in sideshows but the only proprietor he could question confessed deception when Dr. Yerkes told him he was a scientist. What goes on in the jungle Dr. Yerkes does not claim to know. But when a wild female ape is seen carrying two babies there is no assurance, says he, that she bore either of them. Though born somewhat prematurely. Mona's twins were last week approaching their first birthday normal and hale as any chimp youngsters.

* Marmosets, baboons, gibbons and probably most other monkeys have multiple births. So, rarely, do horses, cows, sheep, deer. Some species in which multiple births have never been recorded: whale, porpoise, zebra, buffalo. African antelope, giraffe, camel, llama, sea lion, walrus, hippopotamus, sloth, anteater, and the major varieties of elephant, rhinoceros and kangaroo. Bears ordinarily produce 2-3 young, striped hyenas 3-4, ferrets 6-10, hedgehogs 3-6, Australian dingo dogs 8-10.

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