Ubufatanye experienced the loss of her mother and father and the disintegration of her family group before the age of 5. This is a strong indication that these experiences were indeed adverse from the perspective of a gorilla. Many young gorillas didn’t survive these challenges. These experiences are the gorilla equivalent of some kinds of adversity that are linked with long-term negative effects in humans and other animals. We used this data to identify six adverse events that gorillas younger than age 6 can endure: maternal loss, paternal loss, extreme violence, social isolation, social instability and sibling competition. We conducted doctoral and postdoctoral research with the Fossey Fund and have collaborated with other scientists there for more than 20 years.įrom their database, which stretches back to 1967, we extracted information on more than 250 gorillas tracked from the day they were born to the day they died or left the study area. The best data in the world to conduct such a study comes from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, which has been following individual mountain gorillas in Rwanda almost daily for 55 years. Primatologists know that males can survive into their late 30s and females into their mid-40s. This is no mean feat, given gorillas’ long life spans. To do this, we needed exceptionally detailed long-term data on wild gorillas across their lifetimes. If so, could we gather any insight into the fundamental question of how early life experiences can have long-lasting effects? We wanted to investigate whether a pattern of resilience was more generalized. Losing your mother is only one of many bad things that can happen to a young gorilla, though. Unlike other primates, mountain gorillas don’t appear to suffer any long-term negative effects of losing their mothers at an early age, provided that they reach the age at which they are old enough to have finished nursing. Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund Decades of gorilla observationsĪs scientists who have spent many years studying wild gorillas, we have observed a wide variety of early life experiences and an equally wide variety of adult health outcomes in these great apes. Researchers analyzed decades of observational data to determine how life turned out for young gorillas that had faced adversity. Activities like smoking and unhealthy food choices can’t be the whole story, then, since animals don’t engage in typical human health risk behaviors. For example, female baboons who have the hardest childhoods have life spans that are on average only half as long as their peers that have the easiest. Often, these outcomes trace back at least in part to what public health researchers call health risk behaviors – things like smoking, poor eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle.īut researchers have documented the same kinds of problems in adulthood in nonhuman animals that experienced early life adversity.
People who experience these kinds of traumas, assuming they survive the initial event, are more likely to suffer health problems and social dysfunction in adulthood and to have shorter life spans. Early life adversity can take a wide variety of forms, including malnutrition, war and abuse. In people, a rough start in life is often associated with significant problems later on. Juvenile Titus, who was at a developmental stage similar to that of an 8- or 9-year-old human, experienced more tragedy in his first four years of life than many animals do in a lifetime. In the chaos that followed, his younger sister was killed by another gorilla, and his mother and older sister fled the group. Poachers killed Titus’ father and brother. As is typical for young gorillas in the wild, Titus spent the first years of his life surrounded by his mother, father and siblings, as well as more distant relatives and unrelated gorillas that made up his social group. In 1974, an infant mountain gorilla was born in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.
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