Primatology.net

Last October, London Zoo saw the birth of a new baby gorilla? He has since been named Tiny and he’s walking now.

London Zoo's Tiny

I wanted to ask all Primatology.net readers that live in or around the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be visiting to please consider attending a fun-filled evening of art, music and delicious food in support of the Gorilla Foundation. It will be held on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at the 111 Minna Street Gallery in San Francisco. Silent auction items include signed prints made by Koko, hotel stays, wine, restaurant gift certificates, museum and performing arts tickets, an exclusive Raiders package and a two hour-ride in the KGO jet helicopter around the Bay Area.

Proceeds will benefit the Gorilla Foundation, my previous employer, whose mission is to bring interspecies communication to the public. They also have programs to help save gorillas from extinction and inspire our children to create a sustainable future for all great apes.

Here are the details:

When:
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
6:00 PM – 9:30 PM

Where:
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street (cross street: 2nd Street)
San Francisco, CA

Advanced tickets are $15, and $20 at the door, please visit Koko.org/event for more details. I’d be attending if I were in town, but unfortunately I’ll be flying out that morning and unable to make it. But I ask that you attend, food will be provided by Pasta Pomodoro, Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, Joseph Schmidt Confections and music will also be played. Sounds like a great fundraiser and I’m bummed I can’t make it.

VBS.TV producers were so concerned with the mass gorilla slayings that happened a year ago in Virunga, that they went to Bwindi, in southern Uganda, and made a three part documentary on mountain gorillas. It is titled, “Gorillas in the Midst.”

VBS.TV's Gorillas In The Midst

They’ve put up their show for everyone to watch online. If you don’t know much about the problems with conservation efforts in Uganda, I recommend you watch because they also touch on the political conflicts and controversial issues that looms over the conservation efforts.

San Diego Zoo welcomed the birth of a new baby gorilla last month. I just found the photos on ZooBorn, a blog that you maybe interested in if you’re into newborn animals. The details of the birth are documented on the ZooBorn post, so jump on over there to read up. Otherwise, enjoy these photos and have a good weekend!

I spent a couple years studying non-verbal communication in gorillas, so to read news that there’s some breakthroughs in our understandings handedness and communication in apes made me extremely excited. The news originates from Gillian Sebestyen-Forrester‘s latest paper in the journal Animal Behaviour, “A multidimensional approach to investigations of behaviour: revealing structure in animal communication signals.”

Sebestyen-Forrester observed that a right-handed bias for actions that also involved head and mouth movements among gorillas. As you may know, the right side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, which is also the location for language development. Sebestyen-Forrester’s hypothesis is that this handedness bias offers major clues as to how language developed in humans. Gorillas deploy a wide range of non-verbal communicative behaviors, such as facial expression, eye gazes and manual gestures, and tactile signals (like grooming and huddling which are used for social cohesion). In my own experiences, I quickly came to learn what a lip-smack, pursed lip, chestslap, purr, etc. meant.

Gorilla Social Play

But I digress, Sebestyen-Forrester tested her hypothesis by recording the behaviors of a female gorilla mother and her infant, along with their social network at the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent, United Kingdom. She coded the results and noted that behaviors that involved head and mouth movements correlated with right handedness.

This multidimensional method evaluates all synchronous physical actions of the body in a reciprocal manner. And her analysis did reveal a coordinated physical action, thus demonstrating differences in lateral motor activity. She understands this observation to be ethologically valid to extend that animals with the closest genetic link to humans would express communication skills with some similarities to human.

G FORRESTER (2008). A multidimensional approach to investigations of behaviour: revealing structure in animal communication signals Animal Behaviour DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.05.026

I have had the pleasure of working with Tierra Wilson for a couple years at the Gorilla Foundation. Since then, she’s moved off to veterinary school and I to graduate school. We’ve kept in touch and I was elated to hear that she’s going to Rwanda earlier this summer to study the mountain gorillas there. I didn’t know exactly what she’s up to until I came across Lucy Spelman’s blog post in Discover’s Quest: Gorillas in Peril.

The post, “Tierra’s Summer Project: Gorilla Saliva,” documents Tierra research project from inception to finish. She rounded up her own funding to travel and stay in Rwanda where she created a research project to detect infectious pathogens like herpes and influenza in the gorilla populations. As you may have read on this blog, infectious agents, especially pathogens from ‘human caused origins’ have caused a massive number of great ape deaths — especially in gorillas. Therefore, for any successful conservation effort, it is vital to be screening gorilla populations for any signs of infection. Current methods involve sampling fecal matter but previous research has shown that biomarkers for infection can be detected from saliva. After unsuccessful trials of sampling saliva from anesthetized gorillas, Tierra modified her approach using a method inspired from a publication on saliva collection in chimpanzees.

She designed a ‘a mesh bag with a juice-soaked rope,’ which the gorillas would chew to extract the juice from. The device actually sounds a lot like the enrichment activities she and the other gorilla caregivers like I did at the Gorilla Foundation. And it worked really well, she was able to detect alpha-amylase, an enzyme that is used as a biomarker for stress, i.e. a response to inflammation and infection.

Tierra Wilson Collecting Saliva From Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda, 2008. Picture: Dr. Lucy Spelman/MGVP

She extended her methods to wild populations, where she and the team, sampled several populations. When the Hirwa and Group 13 gorilla groups came down with respiratory disease, she also collected samples from them.

Her research project has since ended in Rwanda, for now, and the samples are currently being shipped back for more in depth analyses on various viruses, microbes, cortisol levels and gorilla DNA. I’m very proud to hear about her work she has done — especially on other primatology blog’s like Lucy Spelman’s. I’m even proud to say I know, “Hey, I know her and worked with her!”

I have some bittersweet news to share with you. If you’re a regular reader of this site, you may know that gorilla populations have been reported as severely endangered. Most of the problems stem from deforestation and poverty. People chop down trees in Africa and ultimately ruin the ecosystems that support these great apes for money. The bush meat industry, regional violence, and infectious pathogens are also a major influence on the dwindling gorilla populations.

Well, some good news for gorilla conservation came out this week from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), researches shared census reports at the International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland. Thanks to Paul Wren for sending me the news. The census data includes a large secluded population (approximately 125,00) of gorillas have resided in two adjacent areas in the northern part of the Republic of Congo, covering an area of 18,000 square

Gorilla Baby & Mom

miles (47,000 square kilometers). So why did such a large number of gorillas go uncounted for?

“WCS says a combination of factors account for such high numbers of gorillas, including successful long-term management of the Republic of Congo’s protected areas; remoteness and inaccessibility of some of the key locations where the gorillas were found; and a habitat where there is plenty to eat, particularly in some of the swamp forests and the “Marantaceae” forests, which are rich in herbs.”

But, this population is only Western lowland gorillas, which are one of four recognized gorilla subspecies. Regardless of this new populations, all subspecies are still considered endangered. Which leads me to this other news piece, where the title basically says it all, “Nearly half of all the world’s primates at risk of extinction.”

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has put out another census report, similar to the WCS, which reports that primate conservation efforts are being drowned out by the bush meat and logging industry. You may remember last year’s census report, where the ‘red list’ was dominated by primate species in the three highest threat categories. In this year’s report, 303 of the 634 primate species are endangered. In other words, 9% more primates species are threatened compared to last year.

Despite the good news of this large population of gorillas in the Republic of Congo, primate conservation is still very much necessary. I’ve been reading some ignoramus comments posted on this blog by people in support of bush meat trade and illegal logging to help impoverished Africans… but these are not sustainable options for Africans. To add to that, when primates species go extinct, and they will so long as advocates support bush meat trade and deforestation, there will be an ecological collapse — what will Africans do for food, money, etc. then? I propose alternatives, which many are already doing, train impoverished Africans to protect and preserve their natural resources. Not only will jobs be created, but conservation efforts will be more successful.

Charlie Rose interviewed Emmanuel de Merode of WildLifeDirect, Brent Stirton and Godefroid Wambale four days ago — three men who know about the massacre of gorillas that happened last year in Virunga National Park. Their interview covers their account of the day where six gorillas were killed.

I’m very pleased with this interview, and even more displeased at Georgianne Nienaber’s comment. Nienaber is an ‘investigative environmental writer’ and tactiless opponent to WildlifeDirect and the ICCN rangers. She says that the arrest of Honore Mashagiro in March of 2008 in relation to these killings was all a setup and masterminded by the strategic interests of white supremacists — and the hero, Paulin Ngobobo is nothing but a figure head. I think she’s smoking crack. She’s using this excellent discussion on gorilla conservation with a major news source to leverage her own conspiracy theory, that is ‘founded’ on no evidence, whatsoever.

I used to work at the Gorilla Foundation, and am still on their organizational mailing list. This weekend they sent me an email announcing a fundraiser they setup for the Mefou Sanctuary in Cameroon on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008. Specifically the event is setup to raise money for their infant gorilla nursery.

The event will be held at 8:30 p.m. to midnight at Doc’s Clock (2575 Mission St., San Francisco, CA). Doc’s Clock has offered $5 toward the fundraiser for everyone that walks in tomorrow night. This is an extremely generous gift and will help the get $19,750 worth of materials needed to build the nursery.

I’m very excited about this fundraiser, and have a prior obligation that will end around 9:30 p.m. but I plan to attend after that. So, if you are in the Bay Area tomorrow night and would like to help out, please attend!

I’m scouring the American Journal of Primatology for a paper on gorillas using tools as weapons in the wild. National Geographic News says the paper is out, but I can’t find it anywhere in the early edition nor in the current issues. I’ll continue looking, but in the mean time here’s what we got to run on (and it ain’t much)

“Researchers [doing a three year study of Cross River gorillas (Gorilla gorilla diehli)] in Cameroon have documented three cases in which the [gorillas] threw clumps of grass or tree branches at humans.”

The people who documented the behavior suggest that the gorillas possibly learned their unusual behavior from interactions with humans. Captive gorillas have been documented picking up stone throwing from their chimpanzee neighbors, so it’s not too improbably that wild gorillas could pick up grass and branch hurling from human neighbors. How did these gorillas learn the behavior? Could it be possibly due to mirror neurons? Conveniently this is a perfect transition into an upcoming PNAS paper on tool use and mirror neurons in macaques, that was announced in this ScienceNOW news article,

“To investigate how the brain performs this sleight of hand, [the team] recorded brain activity in two macaque monkeys. Each was trained for 6 to 8 months to grasp items of food with pliers. The team documented the activity of 113 neurons in F5 and in a brain area called F1, which has also been implicated in the manipulation of objects. The researchers first established the brain’s firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food.”

The research is coming from the University of Parma which seems to be specializing in this sorta research because about a year and half ago they documented mirror neurons role in mimicry. In the new paper, the researchers,

“conclude that when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.” As for how the same neurons could affect both the opening and the closing of the hand, the team speculates that they may be connected with other sets of neurons that more directly control these movements. The authors also point out that area F5 is rich in so-called mirror neurons, a type of nerve cell discovered earlier… that fires both when a primate performs an action and when it observes another individual doing the same thing. Mirror neurons in F5, the authors suggest, may be involved in this transfer process as a monkey learns how to use a tool by watching others.”

The first observations of gorillas using tools in the wild was made a couple years ago, and last year we saw (albeit not too convincingly) a chimp fashioning a spear to hunt, so I’m not too surprised about this news… I just wanna see it!