Lash the Gorilla Wins Place in One Man’s History of Endangered Species : Animals: Zoo-born No. 663 is one of 675 in captivity worldwide, 315 of them in about 50 zoos in North America.

TAMPA, Fla. —  At long last, Lash the gorilla has come into his rightful inheritance, a three-acre primate animal paradise on the dewy shores of Tampa Bay.

“He deserves it,” said Lynn Ash, beaming. “He’s not only going to love it here, he’s going to be king of the place. Wait and see.”

Lynn Ash, like a proud father--or, more aptly, godfather--carries pictures of the gorilla in his wallet. The two have a long history of lives entwined, of survival in a harsh world.

Lash is one of 675 gorillas in captivity worldwide, 315 of them in about 50 zoos in North America.

His story is an odyssey that began in Africa’s west-central lowlands, the original source of all but a handful of captive gorillas. Relentless human pressures on their homeland--plowed fields replacing jungle, farmers shooting crop-raiding gorillas--have shrunk that habitat to the point that gorillas were listed as an endangered species 20 years ago. It is shrinking still.

Since then, zoologists have stepped up their study of the remaining wild gorillas, analyzing the animals’ complex social needs and natural groupings. Zookeepers and zoo biologists, in turn, have striven to provide more congenial captive habitat. The result is a global Species Survival Plan that recently reached a major plateau.

In the last few years the captive gorilla population has risen from a negative growth rate to a positive rate, now about 2% a year. In fact, only 85 of America’s 315 zoo gorillas were born in the wild. All the rest, into a second generation, are captive-born.

“We believe we’re on the road to having a perpetually sustainable population in captivity,” said Dan Wharton of New York’s Bronx Zoo who is the survival program’s coordinator for North America.

Every gorilla born in captivity is assigned a number and listed in an international “stud book” kept in Frankfurt, Germany. Wharton keeps the book for North America. He can track each gorilla by computer, help zoo directors match breeding pairs, form productive groupings, maintain genetic diversity. The program is remarkably cooperative. That gorilla you admire in the Chicago zoo might actually be on loan from, say, the San Diego Zoo.

Gorilla No. 663 in the stud book is Lash:

Male. Born 6:59 a.m. Dec. 25, 1976, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Property of Busch Gardens, Fla. Weight at birth 3 pounds, 5.5 ounces. Father Hatari, No. 209. Mother Megera, No. 200.

Lash’s birth weight was about average. Now, nearly 16 years old, he is a healthy, mature silverback and weighs 363 pounds, a splendid creature with shoulders 4-feet broad and a 40-inch neck. He’ll put on another 100 pounds or so before leveling off.

Lynn Ash is 50. He, too, is of average size, a bit more than average weight, brown hair, brown eyes. He is an artist, head of the graphics department at Busch Gardens, the 300-acre African-theme park in Tampa.

Reproductions of Ash’s work raise money for conservation causes at zoos across the land. Collectors pay dearly for his originals. You might have seen one; he signs them with his initial and last name: LASH.

Like his pongid namesake, Lynn Ash is a rare example of his own species.

He lives in a stilt house on the edge of Green Swamp near Thonotosassa, a backroad village not far from Busch Gardens. There, on an acre left wild and natural, he raises exotic birds: strutting rheas, purple swamp hens, snow white peacocks, Java green jungle fowl, about a dozen rare species, maybe 250 birds in all. Assorted four-legged creatures also have the run of the place. These were found lame or orphaned and brought to Ash with the correct assumption that he would not turn them away.

A 6-foot chain-link fence keeps predators out of Ash’s patch of wilderness, but it is open to the sky. The birds could easily fly away. They do not.

“They like it here,” he shrugs. One reason must be Ash himself.

It is said that some humans have a certain animal magnetism, an invisible aura that animals are drawn to. If so, Lynn Ash is walking evidence of it.

Chatting with this guileless man on the porch of his elevated house, jungle noises all about, pages from childhood picture books come to mind. Like the one of St. Francis stroking the belly of a wolf.

At Busch Gardens, where more than 3,400 animals reside, feral eyes turn to gaze on Lynn Ash as he passes in the crowd. A blind rhinoceros, sensing his presence, ambles over for a pat. A cheetah, Jane, rides beside him in his truck.

Once in a Borneo jungle, where Ash had journeyed to sketch orangutans, a young female climbed in his lap unbidden and caressed his head. In Zaire, he stood amid a group of 25 wild gorillas. A fully grown male charged to within a foot of him, grunted, and moved on. In Kenya, he sketched a wild elephant from 30 feet.

The elephant painting, by the way, went for $5,000. Ever since Ash completed study at the Tampa Academy of Fine Arts he had been able to make a comfortable living. It surprised his less-successful colleagues, then, when suddenly, in 1969, he put his brushes aside.

“I was working against deadlines, doing advertising art,” he said. “The work had drained me. I decided I just wanted to be around animals for a while.”

So he took a job at Busch Gardens. He worked here and there, happily tending animals--birds, Bengal tigers and finally, in 1970, the Gardens’ prize attractions, its two gorillas.

Their names were Hercules (No. 197) and Megera (No. 200), named for the mightiest hero of Greek myth and his legendary first wife. They were taken from the wild in 1964 when both were about a year old. They came here as a pair, lived on an island surrounded by a moat and slept in hidden cages behind.

They took to Lynn Ash as he to them. Each day he announced his arrival with a song. Strains of “You Are My Sunshine” became a signal for Hercules to shuffle himself against the bars for a morning back rub. Megera watched. Around Busch Gardens, Lynn Ash became known as “the gorilla man.”

On July 24, 1974--he remembers the date vividly--Ash noticed Hercules limping and summoned the veterinarian. The doctor tranquilized the animal and treated a bad scratch on his knee.

“As Herk was coming out of the anesthesia,” Ash recalls, “he opened his eyes and looked up at me, then closed them. A moment later he began to choke.”

Instinctively, Ash leaped into the cage and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“Actually it was mouth-to-nostril,” he explained. “I had to close his mouth with both my hands, put a thumb over one nostril and blow in the other.”

Megera, terribly agitated, witnessed all this from the adjoining cage. Lynn Ash, finally spent, stood and walked slowly to her side. Others came and dragged away the huge, lifeless body of her mate.

“When they took Herk,” Ash said, “Megera began this awful wailing. I had never heard anything like it. I was told that gorillas have been known to grieve themselves to death when a mate dies. Just pine away.”

So Lynn Ash put a cot in Hercules’ empty cage where Megera could see him, catch his scent. He stayed four days and nights, touching her, singing to her, until she calmed down. Still, she wouldn’t eat.

Although the scientific Species Survival Plan was eight years off, an informal gorilla network existed among zoo directors. Busch’s Jerry Lentz plugged into it and found a new home for the distraught Megera. That October she went to the Cincinnati zoo where the gorilla population included a handsome male, Hatari, No 209. Ash made the trip in the back of the truck with Megera.

With Hatari, Megera overcame her melancholy. When Lynn Ash visited her six months later she leaped from a shelf in her cage as soon as she heard his voice, touched him through the bars repeatedly and sniffed her fingers. Hatari finally pushed her aside. “I guess he was jealous,” Ash said.

The union was fruitful.

On Christmas Day 1976 the Cincinnati zoo director phoned Tampa to announce that Megera had delivered a baby, a male.

The baby belonged to Busch Gardens. (Megera’s next offspring would belong to Cincinnati and so on, alternately.) It was suggested that they name it Noel.

Lynn Ash suggested Hercules.

Lentz, the Busch director, said no, his staff had taken a vote and it was unanimous. The baby’s name would be Lash.

Sad to say, Megera’s delivery had been fatally difficult. Nineteen days after giving birth, she died. So much has been learned in the past 15 years that such complications are now rare. Nowadays both mother and baby survive 80% of births in captivity, three times as many as in the wild.

Hatari, for his part, moved off to Mexico City. Duty called.

Lynn Ash, inspired by the birth of his namesake, resumed painting. He also took up world travel, with a sketchbook; his paintings finance the trips. He also found time to visit Lash in Cincinnati, take snapshots, watch him grow.

In March, 1986, when Lash was going on 10, the thick black hair on his back began turning to silver, the sign of approaching breeding age.

The species survival program, now in place, cranked into action. Lash was moved to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, Colo., where two budding females awaited his attention.

Lash, however, wasn’t interested. Not quite yet.

Meanwhile, Busch Gardens had built a new gorilla reserve, completed last July, extravagant with waterfalls, a cool and constant mist, trees, rock cliffs, a place designed to match the African homeland its occupants have never seen.

The first residents to arrive were two young males and three females on a long-term breeding loan from the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. All that was missing was what every gorilla group needs, a dominant silverback male. Lash to the rescue!

The splendid gorilla is now being introduced to his new companions, singly at first, later all together. One of them is a comely, 240-pound female, No. 456. Her name is Kishina. She is, said gorilla curator Sheila Wood discreetly, “experienced.” She has a healthy daughter back in Atlanta.

“Kishina is a successful breeder,” Wood said. “I believe she’ll teach Lash what he needs to know.”

We’ll soon find out.

To Lynn Ash, that would be the final brush stroke.