It was a crude procedure, similar to the way transfusions were done for humans before the blood bank was invented at Cook County Hospital in 1937. But there was little veterinary literature on gorilla blood types, such as whether they have different ABO blood groups like humans or if they needed to have blood matched to their own for a successful transfusion. “It’s one of the most basic pieces of knowledge we need for the care of our animals, and it simply wasn’t there,” ape-keeper Jill Moyse said.

Mumbali died despite the intervention. Afterward, as keepers and veterinarians met to grieve her passing, Ms. Moyse told them Mumbali’s death “could only make sense if we can make something good come out of it.”

Five years later, Ms. Moyse and Kathryn Gamble, the zoo’s chief veterinarian, have created an entirely new body of literature on great ape hematology. And they have produced an international registry to record the blood types of apes.

The registry represents all four great ape species – gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos. In North America, it encompasses nearly every healthy male and female adult of the species who could donate blood if another ape of its species with the same blood type needed a transfusion.

“You don’t want to transfuse the wrong type of blood because a transfusion reaction can make a bad situation even worse,” said Ms. Gamble, who recently published the project’s research in the journal Zoo Biology. “These are small populations,” she said, “so emergency calls for blood are pretty rare. But when you need it, you really, desperately need it.”

The project has verified that the blood of different ape species isn’t interchangeable between species or humans, Ms. Gamble said. It found that bonobos have only Type A blood, while orangutans have all four types: A, B, AB and O. Before the project began, the only species of great apes with known blood groups were chimpanzees, the majority of which have Type A blood. That is known because chimps are frequently used as stand-ins for humans in medical research.

To learn more, the Lincoln Park project turned to a Danish company, Eldon Biologicals, which a few years ago revolutionized blood typing with small, chemically coated cards. A blood smear on the cards quickly reveals the donor’s blood type. Ms. Gamble and Ms. Moyse sent the cards out to North American and European zoos with ape collections and to African and Asian sanctuaries that rehabilitate injured and abandoned wild apes to restore them to the wilderness. “Everybody we contacted liked the idea of what we are doing,” Ms. Moyse said.

Because US Customs has strict controls about importing blood products, sanctuaries that lacked personnel to do the card analysis could not send the cards to Chicago, so Ms. Moyse sent them digital cameras to photograph the completed cards and e-mail the photos for analysis at Lincoln Park. Once the cards went
out, it was several years before most eligible apes in the covered institutions had their analyses done.

Getting a blood sample from apes is no easy task. Though the test needs only a tiny blood smear, most big apes won’t willingly undergo a jab of a sharp needle for a blood sample. Because anesthesia is risky, keepers won’t put animals down just for a blood sample. They do, however, anesthetize each of their adult apes roughly every two years for thorough physicals, so the project had to wait to get its blood. As the blood typing cards return to Chicago from around the world, they are revealing new information about the great apes. (Source: Chicago Tribune)

Special thanks to America’s Blood Centers for sharing this article in their January 2011 newsletter.