How would you like to be pregnant for almost two years?

KHOU

Shanti is due to give birth any time.

Shanti, an elephant at the Houston Zoo, has been. She's about to give birth any day.

But nothing about her pregnancy or any other pregnancy at any zoo is left to chance.

You may think it’s the call of the wild that dictates love and life cycles in a zoo, but all captive wildlife reproduction is actually choreographed under the careful eye of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.

“Every two years they go over the captive breeding and see who should be breeding who shouldn’t and who should be breeding with who,” said Daryl Hoffman, Large Mammal Curator for the Houston Zoo.

When the AZA gives the OK, veterinarians determine when Shanti and Tai should hook up.

So much for romance.

"No candles, no dinners no nothing," said Hoffman.

“She was only with him for one day, and we got ourselves a calf in the oven,” said Hoffman.

“For each species we keep what’s called a studbook that’s basically a family tree,” Primates and Carnivores Curator Hollie Colahan said.

Colahan keeps the national studbooks for two species, and after a computer sifts through all the data, the AZA makes its breeding list. 

There are 200 plus accredited zoos and aquariums and so the reproduction pool is limited. The result? a population or survival management plan for everything.

The meerkats exhibit has been open only about a year, but they have been plenty busy here. The latest additions came just this month, and the same mother-father meerkats have had a total of 16 babies at the Houston Zoo.

A giraffe was just born earlier this month, but the AZA recommended an adult be shipped to the Nashville Zoo for breeding there.

The AZA also has a foster program of sorts. For example, at the Houston Zoo there are two young orangutans living with a surrogate mother.

They came from the Memphis Zoo.

"Their mother didn't take care of them so they came here to live with a female we have," Colahan explained. "Our female was a proven surrogate mom."

This is a growing movement -- especially with captive populations that need to be raised by their own species rather than by zookeepers.

Vets draw blood weekly from animals they want to breed to determine when a female is in her cycle. But they say males often know better than they do, when it is time to mate. Pheremones -- or the scent the female gives off during her cycle -- are picked up by the male.

The tamarins could actually have twin babies every six months, so contraceptives from animal Norplant devices to human birth control pills are used.

“Stick it in a banana and hand it to them,” said Hollie.

It’s a whole different species of Planned Parenthood.