Gorilla Sound

On the 4th March I went in the forest as always with Julia and two trackers. That day I followed Mama and then Emilie. I started Emilie at 9:30 and I continued until 12:00, when the afternoon team arrived. Dona and I at that time were not with Kingo but 200 meters away. We had run in the direction of chimps screams close by…trying to see them. We didn’t have luck and afterwards we came back to the camp. That day Kingo decided to cross Mondika river and visit Buka home range in the other side. He was used to visit this forest several years ago, but in the last 5 years he went there very rarely. While I was following Emilie I noted that something was different than normal. She was very close to Kingo, she didn’t feed much and traveled much less than she is used to. At one point she just lay down close to us with one elbow on the ground (Ceasar position) and looked around. I was staring her belly because was strangely quite big. Suddenly, something moved in her belly…and as a little head, something moved from up to down. I immediately called the attention of the tracker, Dona, who, like me, said…”She is pregnant, there is a baby there!!”.
Well, when the afternoon team came back after 5pm, they told us that Emilie had a baby. They found the place where she gave birth, and saw her carrying something very small in her arms. The baby seemed fine and alive. After she gave birth around 3 pm, all the group cross again Mondika and came back in the forest they are more comfortable with. Kenga suggested the perfect name: Mondika. We are now waiting he/she grows up a little more and then the name will be official.
The day after Julia and I went all day in the forest, to `check baby and mother health. Both are fine. Emilie is very sweet with her baby, As soon as she/he cries or says something she embraces her/him immediately. The mother is not eating a lot, she rests often, and eats with just one hand, always not far from Kingo. We have also few videos in which you can see her walking bipedally carrying the infant with two hands, incredible!! If we have the possibility we will upload them asap.

So Kingo has been having lots of sex recently and this blog will talk in a round about way about this. The other day he was lying on the path sleeping and he had his foot in the air. He does this quite a lot but I can never get a good photo because there is always vegetation in the way. So I was going quite crazy taking lots of photos trying to get a good one. One of the trackers asked to see the photos and I showed him feeling really pleased because they’d worked. He looked at them and said no, they didn’t work at all, you can’t see his penis. I looked at Kingo and they way he was lying you could see his rather small penis, which didn’t show up on my photos at all (my zoom isn’t that good!!). So gorillas have the largest sexual dimorphism (difference in size between males and females) of all primates and the smallest male sex organs. This is because all competition over female gorillas is external. Male gorillas fight other males to gain harems and monopolise mating. Once a female is in his group she will only be mating with him (technically) so each copulation doesn’t require a lot of sperm to ensure that he is the father of the offspring. Chimpanzees on the other hand, have internal sperm competition for paternity. Females will mate with as many males as possible while she is fertile. This means that each male that copulates with a female has to ejaculate as much sperm as possible in the hopes that his sperm will win the race to the egg. That is why chimpanzees have huge balls. So bring out your magnifying glasses and see what external sperm competition does to male gorilla reproductive organs! Interestingly, if you regress body mass against testicle mass for primates including humans, humans fall slightly on the side of having internal sperm competition . . . . .

Recently Kingo has been copulating with Mama, up to four times a day over a period of two to three days. When he does have sex it seems to be fascinating for Ekendi. As soon as he can hear it happening Ekendi will run to where Kingo and Mama are and try to get as close as possible. The one time I saw Ekendi ran up and was sniffing Mama’s head. Kingo didn’t appreciate Ekendi being so close so started grunting at him to go away. Ekendi backed off a little but was still super close and was just watching them get on with it. Apparently Kingo doesn’t appreciate being watched like that and the next moment he reaches out and bam! He pushes Ekendi out of the way. Maybe because of Ekendi’s interference it was a long copulation. Right near the end Kingo must have been getting exhausted as he picked up an ngluma fruit and started eating it, still while copulating with Mama!

Sometimes you see things happening that might be hard to quantify scientifically but you know that something has changed. Ekendi is now eating seriously, so the weaning process is really moving along. Unfortunately for Ekendi this is putting him in more and more conflict with Kingo as he is often close to him when he feeds.

Kingo is extremely intolerant of anyone feeding close to him, this includes his own offspring. The very first time I saw Kingo, as a visitor to the Mondika site in 2008, he “attacked” George to take fruit off her.

Over the past few days there have been several instances where Ekendi has come into conflict with Kingo. Ekendi climbed a small tree and was feeding on the leaves. Kingo comes along and decides he wants to be feeding on the leaves so pulls the tree out from under Ekendi. Luckily there was a nearby liana for Ekendi to grab onto, but it happened so fast that he was just dangling from the liana hanging on by his arms as he tried to get his feet onto a nearby tree.

Then the group was feeding on ngluma fruits and Kingo starts aggressively vocalizing. Kingo was slightly hidden in some vegetation so we couldn’t see who he was mad at. Suddenly Ekendi bursts out of the bushes with his arms so full of Ngluma fruits he has to run bipedally to get away from Kingo.

Then the final time Ekendi was sitting at the top of a small tree eating leaves, happily humming away to himself. Kingo can hear him and approaches. He sees that Ekendi is feeding and starts grunting at Ekendi. Ekendi ignores him and keeps feeding. Kingo climbs up the tree, grabs Ekendi by the shoulder and throws him to the ground. Luckily it was a small tree, so Ekendi only fell about two metres. Ekendi was screaming and then lay still on the ground for around ten minutes. I was standing there with my hand over my mouth in shock but the trackers just stood there saying, Kingo is like that, and anyway, Ekendi will be fine. And sure enough, ten minutes later he was up and off again!

One day, while coming back from the swamp, Julia and I smelled a terrible odor on the path. Our trackers, who were walking quite fast didn’t say anything and continued, as it was nothing special. Several times happened that I smelled something bad and immediately I think is a dead animal. Whenever I ask to the trackers mostly every times they reply is a particular tree that smell very bad or there is a decomposed tree near by, which then they show it to me. Thus, this time Julia and I commented but we didn’t ask their opinion. When the second team came back from the forest in the evening they told us that close by the path, where we smelled something, they found a dead chimp. Immediately we alert WCS Head Quarters and the Vets working for WCS. The day after Alan, our vet, came to take some tissue and bone samples from this chimp, in order to test for ebola and potentially to investigate the causes of his death. With one of our trackers we went in the area and guided by the smell we found the carcass. The odor was very strong, terrible. The chimp was lying on his belly, the head on his arms well extended. The day before they saw the face who was completely ruined, potentially by a leopard. The eyes were gone already. When we found it the muscles were disappearing , but most of the skin was still there. It was impressive. It was my first dead chimp. It was a big male. Around the carcass you could see straggle or fight signs that lead us thinking it was victim of a leopard attack. During the day before while we were with the gorillas we heard a lot of chimps screaming nearby, maybe it was the time others from his community found him dead, who knows..
Anyway, we observed Alan doing his job, and we learned a lot about how to handle those samples. He put on a white suite, covering his feet up to his head and three pairs of gloves. In this way he was quite protected in case any body fluid was coming from the carcass. As you know Ebola is transmitted through body liquids, saliva, blood, and any contact with an infected animal. He was very fast and professional, explaining us each step. At the end he collected enough samples, sterilized all tools he used and we came back to the camp. All the samples have been sent to the several labs in collaboration with WCS and as soon as we will know the results we will inform you.

At the beginning of January a new volunteer field assistant arrived at Mondika. His name is Mike. As soon as he arrived we bought him to see Kingo family. That day I went out with Mike and Patrick (research coordinator of the park where Mondika is located) and three trackers. As always, as soon as we found the group, two of the trackers went far away leaving 4 people close to the gorillas. This time was Kete, then the two new comers and me. Kingo was resting, after had climbed a big Ngombe (Celtis sp.) tree. The rest session was really nice, because close to the big father, sleeping with his legs up, there were Kusu and Ekendi playing around him. Further away Ugly was resting while the little Kenga was climbing walking and playing around and on his mama body. When the rest session ended, Kingo went to feed in the ebuka close by. We followed Kingo and Kusu and Ekendi where playing and slowly walking behind us. At one point, we left them the path free to reach Kingo. I was just standing under a small tree falling down by one side, when Kusu, who observed for a while this little tree, passed under and grabbing it managed to hit me with it on my head!!
It was really funny, because you could see he planned to do that. But the tree hit me quite strongly, making a big noise, and Kusu (not expecting so much from his action) got scared. Immediately jumped away and looked at me as he was asking: what did happen?? Who did that to you?? You could see from his face that he was feeling guilty (and waiting for a bad reaction from me)! We all laughed and went to see what Kingo was doing. After an hour of visit we then came back to the camp.

PS: We know that same times in our stories we humanize too much our gorillas, but we think that this blog is a good place to talk about scientific matters as well as emotional and personal experiences. We would like to transmit our love and dedication for these splendid animals who, for many times, stroked our minds for how close to humans they are, behave and feel. Hoping you understand..

Mondika is currently habituating a second group of gorillas. If you think of the campsite being in the south Kingo’s home range is to the north, across the river. Buka’s home range is to the west and straddles the river which they frequently cross. Now, however it seems their home range is expanding to include the camp! I came back from the forest one day around ten. Buka’s trackers were sitting on the porch in front of the restaurant, but I was thinking of other things and just assumed they were the trackers that hadn’t gone out yet. Then I see movement from the corner of my eye and Buka is just walking in the vegetation next to the river, 15m away! Maybe they’ve decided to give us a taste of our own medicine! It is a little strange to be going about the camp with female gorillas up in the trees watching your every move!

Following gorillas isn’t always glamourous and fun when you have to put up with the million bagillion insects the forest can throw at you. First there are sweat bees. These are tiny little bees whose favourite place to be is in your eye, up your nose, down your ear or under your watch. There will always be a few around but there are certain places where there are sweat bee nests and then its agony. You have to wear a head net and thousands of them will crawl all over you. This is, of course, the perfect place for Kingo to take a three hour nap. Apparently he’s immune to the annoyance factor. One way to keep the sweat bees away is to put vicks vapour rub on. However I found out the hard way that putting it around your eyes does keep the bees away but man oh man does it sting!
The next ones are army ants. There are two ways of meeting these. The first easier way is when they are moving somewhere and are in a line and you can step over them, problem solved. But these ants will also hunt so you will have millions of them moving over a large area trying to kill everything that moves (by biting you to death – not a pleasant way to go). Your first hint this is happening is all you can hear is this rustling noise (from all of them moving across the forest floor) and then you see all the other insects getting the hell out of the way. And these adorable ants come in two varieties, the smaller, bite you and it hurts variety, and the larger, massive head and fangs, bite you and it hurts so much I screamed the first time it happened and you bleed.
So once I was following Emilie and she decides to go off into the ebuka thickets and take a nap. It just so happens there are army ants on the hunt so she goes and lies down on the other side of a log where there are no ants. My tracker and I had to spend 20 minutes swatting ants off ourselves while we waited for her to move so we could also get over the log into the ant free zone!
And once I saw Kingo step in a line of army ants and boy did he move fast in the opposite direction!

When we work in the forest I usually follow Kingo while Roberta follows one of the females. We have radios to communicate with each other when we are out of sight so we can keep tabs on the spread of the group. The other day Kingo was feeding on Ngluma fruits. My tracker and I were sitting down with our backs against a tree when suddenly WHOOOOOOOP WHOOOOOOP WHOOOOOP WHOOOOOOP my radio starts screaming like an air raid siren. And at about the same decibel level. I managed to switch it off but it seemed to take forever because I was desperately trying to pull the radio out of the front pocket of my bag and switch it off as quickly as possible which of course makes you panic and you muck it up. It was maybe on for 7 seconds. Kingo just keeps eating. I don’t even think he looked up.
Which is good because he hasn’t always been so tolerant of noise. Roberta told me previously she was following Kingo with the microphone and there was a few seconds of feedback and he was not happy at all! Maybe eating fruit (especially now when fruit is really scarce) is truly his number one priority!
We figured out that me leaning against the tree must have pressed the ‘emergency sos’ button on the radio. Nice to know that it works but from now on I’m going to be very careful about how I lean on vegetation!

Emilie is Kingo’s youngest female. She arrived in March 2008 and after a lot of human avoidance settled down and is ‘self habituated’. We think she is nullaparous meaning that she still hasn’t had any babies. A lot of the time if Ekendi isn’t with Mekome or Kingo he will hang out with Emilie. They don’t really do much, she’ll be eating termites and he’ll be looking over her shoulder. They’ll travel together. They’ll sit side by side and eat vegetation. Sometimes they’ll rest close together. They just seem to enjoy each other’s company.
But for how much longer? The other day the first cracks appeared in their relationship. Ekendi was eating and Emilie approached him and began to feed on the same patch. Kingo was passing close by both of them. Ekendi starts cough grunting at Emilie and even tries to swipe at her! I don’t know if it was because Kingo was passing close by and Ekendi thought Kingo might support him or if he was just incredibly hungry and didn’t want to share his food, or maybe a combination of the two. But is this the end of a beautiful friendship?*
*And should Kingo be worried? Previously I worked at Mbeli bai where we monitor 15 groups that come and feed in the clearing. One young silverback who had been solitary turned up with a female that had previously been in his father’s group!