Zoos are like little cities with hundreds or thousands of residents, with lifespans of weeks (insects) to centuries (Galapagos tortoises). Generally some die every day, for reasons ranging from the pedestrian to the horrifying (but usually less horrifying and more pain-mitigated than in the wild).

Not to be one of those "why is this news?" people, but what about this story caught your eye?

I can always tell it's a Mudede post, even when I'm looking at the titles in the RSS feed. Who else would so conspicuously mis-spell "gorilla?"

@1 - that's sort of a lousy comparison. Zoos would be prisons, not cities.

@1 also #1, something that happens every 38 years is fairly notable.

Are you going to say that me or you dropping dead in the next five minutes wouldn't be in some way tragic because people die all the time?

Dee @3, perhaps more like a corporate (for a lot of reasons) campus—the denizens are not under sentence exactly, but unauthorized departures lead to dire consequences.

@4, having grieved for a few great apes myself, it is sad, but there were doubtless multiple such deaths in U.S. zoos in the last year; I was just asking Charles why this got on his radar. It was TOLEDO, after all. He must have a Google Alert set.