![]() If a juvenile gorilla is orphaned, for example, other group members, particularly the alpha male, will step in to provide more care. The animals also live in tightly knit social groups with high degrees of support. There’s plenty of water and food, and the forest is protected from loggers and poachers, so their physical needs are met. For one, the gorillas whose lives are recorded in the database “live in this weird little bubble” where they do not face ecological scarcity, Rosenbaum says. Rosenbaum and her colleagues do not have a definitive explanation for their findings, but they do have a hypothesis. “Obviously, humans are not gorillas, but it is incredibly valuable to have comparative data on this phenomenon in a long-lived species and one that shares so many biological similarities with humans.” “It is quite surprising to learn that individuals who weather adversity in their early years do not suffer long-term consequences for survival,” says Melissa Emery Thompson, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in the new study. Taken together with the finding about male gorillas, this suggests that the species in general is “just more resilient,” Rosenbaum says. “The basic idea is that you only survive that early stuff if you’re a particularly high-quality animal,” she says.įor female gorillas, there was no difference in longevity, whether or not the animals went through a tough first few years. In fact, males who experienced the highest levels of adversity tended to live longer than males who experienced the least amount of adversity-a finding that Rosenbaum and her colleagues think is likely attributable to viability selection. But to their surprise, those individuals that did manage to survive past age six experienced no negative impact on how long they lived. ![]() ![]() Young gorillas who were exposed to multiple adversities suffered up to nearly 30 times the risk of death before age six, the researchers found. Then the team looked at how long each of the animals in the study lived. They examined whether each animal experienced any of six types of early-life adversity before age six, including losing their mom or dad, living through group instability or witnessing the infanticide of a fellow young animal. Rosenbaum and her colleagues focused on 253 gorillas from 19 social groups. “Literally hundreds of people over 55 years went out every day to watch the gorillas.” “It’s really, really unusual to have that kind of detailed demographic data to do a study like this, especially in wild apes,” Rosenbaum says. Launched in 1967, the database contains daily, lifelong observations of more than 400 mountain gorillas monitored in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. The new study was made possible by the existence of a unique database currently managed by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a nonprofit conservation group in Rwanda. But it’s difficult to disentangle those observations from the fact that these animals are kept in unnatural settings. Evidence suggests that chimpanzees and bonobos who suffer early-life traumas in captivity oftentimes go on to develop long-term psychological problems. Studying how long-lived animals in the wild respond to early-life adversity is difficult, and until now, researchers did not have much insight into the impact such events have on nonhuman great apes. Understanding how one of our closest relatives copes with early life trauma could strengthen insights into why some people manage to do the same, she adds, whereas others continue to be haunted by negative childhood experiences throughout life. “For reasons we’re still trying to understand, gorillas seem to be remarkably resilient to early-life adversity,” says Stacy Rosenbaum, a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan and senior author of the new paper. So long as young gorillas who experience adversity make it past the age of six, they will go on to lead lives just as long as their untraumatized peers, researchers reported on May 15 in Current Biology. ![]() But this tendency, seen across the animal kingdom, seems to have at least one exception: mountain gorillas. Whether you’re a human or an elephant, a baboon or a fish, adversity experienced early in life is often linked to negative effects on longevity and health in adulthood.
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