Faustina

Western lowland gorillas face extinction in the wild, with fewer than 100,000 remaining across their African range. At Zoológico de Guadalajara, one female has called the same facility home for thirty years. Born to parents Chencha and Chato in March 1994, she represents a generation of gorillas raised entirely in managed care.

Faustina grew up within the established social structure at Guadalajara, learning behaviors and hierarchies from her mother and the broader troop. Her subspecies — Gorilla gorilla gorilla — carries the IUCN’s most urgent conservation designation of Critically Endangered.

Three decades after her birth, she remains at the same Mexican zoo where she first opened her eyes. Her long residency at Guadalajara makes her one of the facility’s most established great apes, part of an international effort to maintain genetic diversity in captive populations of this vanishing species.