How do zoo animals get their names? Here's what they do at the Milwaukee County Zoo

Trish Khan, the Milwaukee County Zoo's curator of primates and small mammals, has worked at the zoo for more than 30 years, and in that time, methods for naming animals have changed.

"It used to be a hard, fast rule that whoever found the baby in the morning got naming rights," Khan said, laughing. "That's why a lot of older animals have names like Tommy (an orangutan at the zoo) because the person who found them named them after themselves and got bragging rights."

Khan said it's also been popular over the years to name animals according to a theme. There are Baja Blast and Baja Splash, two Baja blue rock lizards named after popular sodas. And Khan recalls mongooses named after the Golden Girls.

Respectful names that represent the story behind the animals

But these naming conventions are becoming less common as zoos "move more toward names of significance around either a conservation message or that represent the animal in a dignified way," Khan said.

For the primates she works with, that has translated into giving animals names in the languages that are common in the regions their species are from.

For example, the zoo's spider monkeys — Hue Hue, Chimal and Momos — were all named after cities in Guatemala, and the zoo's first bonobos were named after two major rivers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Maringa and Lomako. And when new bonobos are born at the zoo nowadays, their names are in one of three languages spoken in the Congo: Swahili, Lingala or French.

Milwaukee's zookeepers also add some meaningful quirks to the animals' names. Since 2000, bonobo babies have been given names that start with subsequent letters of the alphabet — "A" for a baby born in 2000, "B" for 2001 and so on.

Milwaukee County Zoo bonobo keeper Stacy Whitaker touches the bonobo named Zomi. The bonobo next to Zomi is named Noelle.

"That's helpful for me because when people ask me how old a particular bonobo is, I can count on my fingers," Khan said, laughing.

And the names often have further significance to the zookeepers' relationships to the animals. For example, bonobo Kitoko — which means "beauty" in Lingala — is quite beautiful according to Khan, and another bonobo, Zomi, was named after the Lingala word for 10 because, according to Khan, "she's definitely a 10."

Even when the zoo opens up naming rights to the public in social media contests — that's how gentoo penguin Pepper and Bactrian camel Leilani got their names — the animal care staff choose the options for visitors to vote from.

These intentional naming methods reflect a desire to respect the animals in their care and to help zoo visitors relate to and empathize with the animals as they learn more about where they come from and the importance of conserving their habitats.

"We want people to see the animals' intelligence, their beauty, to relate to them and want to make a deeper connection," Khan said. "And names are significant; they help define what we think about these animals, and they follow them through their entire lives.

More than 2,000 animals live at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Here are the names of some of them.