Mainstreet Daily News
Following their recent online naming auction, the Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo’s baby gibbon now has a name—Cusa.
To celebrate the first birthday of the SF Zoo’s first blonde white-handed gibbon, zoo staff engaged the community in an online auction from Aug. 24 through Sept. 10 to give him a name.
The auction received multiple bids and the winner of the auction was CAMPUS USA Credit Union, a longtime supporter of SF and the SF Teaching Zoo. The name they chose is Cusa (pronounced Q-sah), and it is also an acronym for CAMPUS USA. CAMPUS employees held a vote and Cusa won by a landslide.
The zoo plans to use the funds raised by the auction to directly support care to the animals, improvements to primate enclosures, and education and conservation efforts to ensure a future for wildlife. It costs around $2,000 to feed the gibbon family annually, $2,500 to support their medical care from the UF College of Veterinary Medicine, and $1,500 for habitat maintenance and enrichment, according to Santa Fe College.
To help support the SF Teaching Zoo, the college has an Adopt-An-Animal program, where donations help provide for the care and feeding of the animals, as well as providing important funding for habitat enrichment programs and exhibit improvements. For more information, visit sfcollege.edu/zoo/support/adopt to learn more.