Great Ape Trust of Iowa will increase its orangutan population from three to nine, with a donation from Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife, and has begun looking into expanding its facility and initiating a capital campaign in the near future.

For now, it welcomed Katy, 19, and her son, Rocky, 3, to the facility this past Saturday. The other four will arrive over the course of this year. Another two orangutans are at a separate sanctuary in California, and at this time, Great Ape Trust is not planning to move them to Des Moines.

“This is absolutely one of the most important events I’ve been associated with in the 25 years I’ve been working with orangutans,” said Robert Shumaker, director of the orangutan research at Great Ape Trust.

Discussions with Shumaker led Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife, which specializes in providing trained animals for entertainment and advertising, to donate the orangutans to the trust and discontinue its use of orangutans in entertainment.

This is one success in Great Ape Trust’s mission to improve the well-being of captive apes and the conservation of wild apes. According to a survey conducted of visitors to Great Ape Trust and cited in Science magazine this March, the appearance of apes in advertising and entertainment negatively influenced the general public’s perception of the conservation status of apes in the wild.

Dramatically increasing the number of apes at the facility also will “increase the potential of our scientific research, specifically helping us to better understand individual variation and styles of learning,” Shumaker said.