The Rhinos: Masamba, Then Frankie

Masamba 2019 – fall 2025; Frankie announced February 2026, arrived spring 2026

Lead: The zoo's first rhinoceros arrived in 2019: Masamba, a male southern white rhinoceros, three years old, exhibited beside the okapi — a three-year-old rhino is already most of a ton of animal, and the zoo's magazine, saying goodbye six years later, called him plainly "the Zoo's first rhino." He became one of the zoo's signature animals, met up close by visitors at rhino encounters; the zoo's published figures credit him with a diet of about twenty cups of grain a day at the end. In the fall of 2025 the Species Survival Plan system moved him on: because his bloodline was not yet well represented in the AZA's southern white rhino population, the Southern White Rhinoceros SSP recommended Masamba to The Wilds, the 10,000-acre AZA conservation center at Cumberland, Ohio, to be grouped with a crash of five or six females for breeding. The zoo announced the move on 4 September 2025 without a set date — "expected that he will leave sometime this fall" — and he was gone by November, the zoo posting photographs of his crating and transport. The succession was arranged in the same recommendation system: on 26 February 2026 the Brevard Zoo in Florida announced that its twenty-three-year-old male southern white rhino, Frankie, would move to Potawatomi "in the coming months," so that South Bend would still be home to the species; the Tribune's season preview of 26 March 2026 had Frankie arriving in early April as the zoo's newest big attraction. One rhino out on a breeding recommendation, another in by the same system — the entries print the exchange at the size the two zoos and the Tribune documented it.

Sources:

1. Potawatomi Zoo release, "Rhino leaving Zoo," 4 September 2025 (the SSP recommendation; The Wilds; the expected fall move).
2. Potawatomi Zoo, Fall 2025 Uproar, "An Icon Moves On" (Masamba the zoo's first rhino; arrived 2019 aged three; the breeding recommendation).
3. Brevard Zoo release, "Wishing Frankie the Southern White Rhino Well on His Move," 26 February 2026 (Frankie, twenty-three, to come to Potawatomi).
4. South Bend Tribune, season preview, 26 March 2026 (Frankie arriving early April 2026).