Ramar, one of the oldest gorillas in the country, celebrated a milestone birthday this month with a frozen “cake” filled with fruit and raisins. 

Over the past year, staff from Shedd Aquarium’s Animal Response Team have come to the aid of animals across the globe. Here’s an update on how some of them are doing.

A Mexican wolf pup born this spring at Brookfield Zoo and released into the wild as part of a species recovery program was tracked down in New Mexico and is healthy, the zoo announced this week.

The black-crowned night heron is one of the rarest birds in Illinois. Lincoln Park Zoo now hosts a colony of more than 600 herons, but things have getting a bit crowded. 

Shedd Aquarium experts are among those caring for a whale calf rescued Sept. 30 in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The calf belongs to a critically endangered population of beluga whales.

Dante, a 30-pound alligator snapping turtle, made his public debut after passing a routine physical exam, which was actually quite similar to a human checkup.

Illinois will become the first state to ban the use of elephants in circuses and other traveling exhibitions, putting an official end to a practice that animal rights activists have been protesting for decades.

The zoo’s newest residents are being hand-reared by keepers, and scientists will analyze their genetics as part of an international species survival plan.

The young males belong to a highly social zebra species and will eventually share a habitat with the zoo’s giraffes. 

For the first time, Lincoln Park Zoo is offering visitors a chance to get up close and personal with their African penguins. We meet three waddling, webbed-feet bachelors.

Four webbed-feet members of a rare and endangered duck species have a new home in Chicago.

Life as an amphibian is no easy hop through the woods. Why Chicago scientists are measuring levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) in Lake County frogs.

Lincoln Park Zoo will give away hundreds of condoms this week as part of a nationwide outreach program to draw attention to the link between human population and endangered species.

Like many humans approaching their elder years, a 49-year-old western lowland gorilla named Ramar has been dealing with knee pain.

On a mission from Chicago, two Shedd Aquarium staffers have been providing around-the-clock care for a sea otter pup rescued in Alaska. 

The striped “forest giraffe” is the 28th okapi to be born at the suburban zoo since 1959, when it became the first zoo in North America to have a birth of the species.