Archive for April 25th, 2007
The Mountain Gorilla comeback
The Mountain Gorilla, Gorilla beringei beringei, is the primate comeback kid.
I previously shared news with you that their population has been making a rebound. Since then, The Times has published a news article on this topic. (Thanks, Paulin!) Before we get into it, I wanted to say that I haven’t noticed any US news sources report on this, which is disheartening. But anyways, I won’t let that get me down. It’s not often good news like this comes around. Suffice to say, I’m pretty ecstatic to tell you that mountain gorilla populations have,
“been boosted by 12 per cent over the last decade in Uganda…
Mountain gorillas, Gorilla beringei beringei, are one of the most threatened animals in the world, with only 720 left in the wild after years of decline in the face of hunting by humans and habitat loss.
In Bwindi, in southwest Uganda, where they live in a national park, genetic analysis of stools revealed that the population had risen by 40 to 340 in ten years.”
The article goes on to write how this has broke down to be an average increase of 1%, which is a steady increase indicating a healthy, thriving, and well-protected population. But that doesn’t mean the conservation effort for these primates is all done and good now. A population of under 1,000 individuals is still critically endangered.
A lot can still be done to improve their comeback into a full blown population rebound. One thing that comes to mind is to control your cell phone purchases. I know it sounds unrelated, but cell phone manufacturing has a tie-in with gorilla habitats. Another factor to keep in mind goes out to you eco-tourists. Don’t visit the gorillas if you are sick. They are capable of getting our infectious agents, and actually are even more susceptible, because they do not have the acquired immune resistance we do.
A bit on Chimpanzee kin selection, especially brother-brother relations
In chimpanzee communities, it pays to be close with your maternal brethren, according to a brand new publication in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The large chimpanzee population at Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda, was studied for this research paper both thru behavioral and molecular approaches. I’m assuming the molecular techniques were used to trace pedigrees and lineages.
The specific scope of the research was to assess the kinship relations among male chimpanzees in this population. From the abstract of paper, the research,
“show[s] that male chimpanzees clearly prefer to affiliate and cooperate with their maternal brothers in several behavioral contexts. Despite these results, additional analyses reveal that the impact of kinship is limited; paternal brothers do not selectively affiliate and cooperate, probably because they cannot be reliably recognized, and the majority of highly affiliative and cooperative dyads are actually unrelated or distantly related. These findings add to a growing body of research that indicates that animals cooperate with each other to obtain both direct and indirect fitness benefits and that complex cooperation can occur between kin and nonkin alike.”
What does that mean? We already knew chimpanzee social structure is highly maternal and usually dominant mother chimps raise dominant sons. Well this research adds to this, indicating that sons, or ‘princes’ if you may, establish a network to dominate hierarchy over the population they preside… sorta like a chimpanzee royalty.
I’m a bit uncertain about the statement on how paternal brothers can’t identify one another… On one level, this seems logical. Its very improbable to know “who your daddy is” in a chimpanzee troop. But, a chimpanzee intimately knows his or her mother, because she reared him or her. However chimpanzees have a very high intellectual capacity, and I’m thinking they know at some level who fathered them. I won’t be willing to bet my life savings, but it is very probable.
If you would like to read more about the article, please check it out under this title and link, “The limited impact of kinship on cooperation in wild chimpanzees.” One last note, I’m not surprised this fieldwork & molecular 1,2 combo came from the primatological powerhouse that is Max Planck Institute’s department for Evolutionary Anthropology, are you?
