gorillas in Biological News

UC Davis launches 'One Health' care for wild mountain gorillas and human neighbors

The University of California, Davis, today launched a new "One Health" program to conserve the world's remaining 740 mountain gorillas by caring for not only the gorillas but also the people and the other animals that share their home in the forests of central Africa. With $750,000 in funding f...

Escherichia coli bacteria transferring between humans and mountain gorillas

Bwindi, Uganda November 24, 2008 A new study finds that mountain gorillas are at increased risk of acquiring gastrointestinal microbes, such as Escherichia Coli , from humans. The study, published in Conservation Biology , examines the exchange of digestive system bacteria between humans, moun...

Ebola outbreaks killing thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees

Why have large outbreaks of Ebola virus killed tens of thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees over the last decade? Observations published in the May issue of The American Naturalist provide new clues, suggesting that outbreaks may be amplified by Ebola transmission between ape social groups. The st...

Uganda's mountain gorillas increase in number

The most recent census of mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park—one of only two places in the world where the rare gorillas exist—has found that the population has increased by 6 percent since the last census in 2002, according to the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the Wildlif...

Wild gorillas carriers of a SIV virus close to the AIDS virus

In 2005, 40.3 million people in the world, including 25.8 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, were living with HIV. The question of the origin of HIV-1, responsible for the AIDS pandemic, has been stimulating the scientific community for many years. Some months ago, the team of Martine Peeters, direct...

Wild Gorillas Handy with a Stick

Editor : Read the original article on PLoS Biology, with pictures! When chimpanzees were first seen using tools in Liberia in 1951, little was known about great ape behavior in the wild. The sighting was published as a short note by Harry Beatty in the Journal of Mammalogy (recounted by prim...

Poaching, logging, and outbreaks of Ebola threaten central African gorillas and chimpanzees

Experts call for $30 million action plan to save mankind's closest relatives A combination of natural and man-made threats is killing gorillas and chimpanzees in Central Africa, and experts say $30 million is needed for special programs to save some of mankind's closest relatives from disappeari...

Retrovirus struck ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas millions of years ago, but did not affect ancestral humans

The ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas were infected with a deadly retrovirus about three to four million years ago, but there is no evidence it infected ancestors of modern-day humans, according to research by genome scientists. The virus struck after humans had split off the evolutionary tree ...

New theory on why male, female lemurs same size

...ew of the observational work done on lemurs, Dunham came to the conclusion that male lemurs do guard their mates, just like other primates. But unlike gorillas and other primates that fight for mating rights with females, male lemurs have evolved to passively guard their mates. They do this by depositing a...

Humans related to orangutans, not chimps, says new Pitt, Buffalo Museum of Science study

...hree apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). gorillas and chimpanzees shared 11 unique characteristics. ...rities, Schwartz and Grehan write. Chimpanzees and gorillas were found to share only those features found in a...thick-enameled teeth. They labeled chimpanzees and gorillas as African apes and wrote in Biogeography that alt...

Gorilla gets MRI at Bronx Zoo

...xhibit, which houses one of the largest breeding groups of western lowland gorillas in North America (more than 20 individuals). Fubo recently suffered a seizu...lla. The procedure contributes to the knowledge of veterinary healthcare of gorillas and other primates which will help WCS's health care programs and those of ...

Professor to measure environmental impact of war

...60 percent of the continent's biodiversity, threatens the last 700 mountain gorillas that are on the brink of extinction. "It is very difficult to determine the exact number of gorillas because they are located in the Virunga national park, which is a trans-bor...

Evolutionary biologist will study HIV with grant from AIDS research foundation

...n cells, Sawyer will look in the genomes of primates for an evolutionary record of these lockstep changes. African primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas have been evolving with the precursor to HIV, called SIV, for millions of years. They rarely get sick from the virus. Evolutionary theory predicts tha...

Wildlife Conservation Society helps Cameroon create new national park

...he western lowland gorilla is the most populous of the four gorilla subspecies. Last year, WCS scientists discovered more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas in the northern Republic of Congo. Other subspecies include: eastern lowland or "Grauer's" gorillas, restricted to eastern Democratic Republic of Cong...

Ancestral genome of present-day African great apes & humans had burst of DNA sequence duplication

...per. "It is unclear why, but the common ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas had an unusual activity of duplication," Kidd added. "Moreover, we don't ye...cted by these duplications." The great ape ancestors, from whom humans, gorillas and chimps descended, lived in Africa between 8 million and 12 million year...

Pubic hair provides evolutionary home for gorilla lice

...red around 3.3 million years ago, humans are believed to have diverged from gorillas much earlier - at least 7 million years ago - suggesting that early humans ...s from their prey. The close contact involved in human ancestors butchering gorillas could have enabled Pthirus to jump hosts, rather as bushmeat slaughter prac...

New national park protects world's rarest gorilla

...ldlife in Cameroon, including: baseline surveys of gorillas and other large mammals; meetings and agreements w...rve a national park will effectively protect these gorillas and will continue the conservation partnership bet...tists discovered more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas in the northern Republic of Congo. WCS is the only...

Unexpected large monkey population discovered

...also announced at the IPS Congress the discovery of 125,000 western lowland gorillas in northern Republic of Congo, where conservation work has been ongoing since the early 1990s. "Whether it's protecting gorillas in the Republic of Congo or monkeys and gibbons in Cambodia, conservation c...

Wildlife Conservation Society discovers 'Planet of the Apes'

...opulation of critically endangered western lowland gorillas received a huge boost today when the Wildlife Cons...w census tallied more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas in two adjacent areas in the northern part of the ...la "nests" to accurately estimate the population. gorillas construct nests each night from leaves and branche...

Wild chimpanzees appear not to regularly experience menopause

...ndividuals which had postulated that female chimpanzees reach reproductive senescence at 35 to 40 years of age. Together with recent data from wild gorillas and orangutans, the finding -- described this week in the journal Current Biology -- suggests that human females are rare or even unique among primate...

Walking tall to protect the species

...fely imposes limits on the weight of the infants. Through a detailed mechanical analysis of how different types of apes - gibbons, orangutans and gorillas - carry their young, looking at the properties of ape hair, infant grip, adult hair density and carrying position, Amaral demonstrates a relationship ...

World's most endangered gorilla fights back

... the first time the use of weaponry by Cross River gorillas to ward off threats by humans, the Wildlife Conser...Journal of Primatology, found several instances of gorillas throwing sticks and clumps of grass when threatened by people. gorillas usually flee and rarely charge when encountered by...

Great Ape Trust awards $127,000 for international conservation efforts

...ation initiatives that support orangutans in Asia; bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas in Africa; and golden lion tamarins in South America. All of the apes ar... about West African chimpanzees in Ivory Coasts Banco National Park. gorillas Cross River Gorilla Rangers $10,000 Provided salaries for two teams ...

Primate sperm competition: speed matters

...eem to be an advantage to them, Nascimento said. However the researchers were surprised that the speed and force of human sperm fell in between the gorillas and the chimps. Maybe humans havent always been as monogamous as we had thought, Berns said. Beginning more than 35 years ago, scientists began usi...

Was ability to run early man's Achilles heel?

... for the Advancement of Science) Festival of Science in York on Tuesday proposes that if early humans lacked an Achilles tendon, as modern chimps and gorillas do, then their ability to run would have been severely compromised. Our research supports the belief that the earliest humans used efficient bipeda...

Ancient retrovirus sheds light on modern pandemic

...IM5a, which produces a protein that binds to and destroys the virus before it can replicate within the body. "We know that PtERV1 infected chimps, gorillas and old-world monkeys 4 million years ago but left no traces of having infected humans. Our theory is that this is because humans had this innate vira...

Lessons from the orangutans: Upright walking may have begun in the trees

...s, known as the savannah hypothesis, suggests that the ancestors to chimps, gorillas and humans descended from the trees and began walking on the ground on all ...r-legged gait would have evolved into the "knuckle-walking" that chimps and gorillas still use today and then into upright, two-legged walking in humans. P...

Gene study shows three distinct groups of chimpanzees

..." said Przeworski. "These are our nearest relatives, closer to humans than they are to gorillas, yet we know so little about them, and even less about gorillas and orangutans." The chimpanzee genome differs from the bonobo genome by about 0.3 percent, which is one-fourth the distance between humans and...

Ebola-outbreak kills 5000 gorillas

...st showed that 93% (221 of 238) individually known gorillas at the Lossi Sanctuary in northwest Congo were kil...asible than previously appreciated. At Lossi, most gorillas appeared not to be infected directly from some res...al people. Ebola not only wiped out the habituated gorillas at Lossi, it also neutralized years of ecotourism ...

Gorilla susceptibility to Ebola virus: the cost of sociality

... By monitoring a large population of gorillas during an Ebola outbreak in the rain forest of the...e major threats to the survival of western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan tro...re they were studied from 2001. In all, around 400 gorillas were identified from their individual morphologica...

Protecting endangered species helps reduce poverty

... Saving endangered species like pandas, gorillas and tigers helps reduce poverty and improve the lives of local communities, according to a new World Wildlife Fund report. Now as the eighth Conferenc...

Ebola virus: from wildlife to dogs

... humans do not become directly contaminated from the animal reservoir, which is an any case still unknown, but from infected carcasses of chimpanzees, gorillas and certain forest antelopes. Results have come from work conducted over the past several years by IRD scientists and their partners (1) to shed light...

Chimp genome reveals a retroviral invasion

...lement; the divergence of LTR sequences within a species can be used to estimate the age of an initial infection. Eichler and colleagues estimate that gorillas and chimps were infected about 3 -- 4 million years ago, and baboon and macaque about 1.5 million years ago. The disconnect between the evolutionary h...

Oldest fossil human protein ever sequenced

...as well as osteocalcin sequences from living primates (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans). The team found that the Neanderthal sequence was the same ... sequences of Neanderthals, humans, chimpanzees and orangutans from that of gorillas and most other mammals. This sequence difference is at position nine where ...