Quantcast
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1268

Young Gorillas Have Learned to Dismantle Poacher's Traps in The Wild

From our community:

In Rwanda’s Volanoes National Park, poachers construct thousands of rope and branch snares to catch antelope and other game species. Animal snares are constructed by tying a rope noose to a branch. “Using the rope, they pull the branch downward, bending it. They then employ a bent stick or rock to hold the noose to the ground, keeping the branch tense. A sprinkling of vegetation camouflages the noose. When an animal bumps or budges the stick or rock, the branch springs upward, closing the noose around the prey. If the creature is light enough, it will be hoisted into the air”.

The bush meat hunters are not intending to catch gorillas, but sometimes they do. The victims are young gorillas who do not have the strength to break the grip of the snare. The adults of this critically endangered species can break free of the trap but, the youngsters suffer in the snares grip until death ends their misery.  

This remarkable behavior of disassembling snare traps has been known since 2012 when National Geographic reported on two 4 year old gorillas who discovered how to destroy the snares set by poachers before they could kill their friends and family. 

Just days after a poacher's snare had killed one of their own, two young mountain gorillas worked together Tuesday to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan forest home..."This is absolutely the first time that we've seen juveniles doing that ... I don't know of any other reports in the world of juveniles destroying snares," said Veronica Vecellio, gorilla program coordinator at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund's Karisoke Research Center, located in the reserve where the event took place..."We are the largest database and observer of wild gorillas ... so I would be very surprised if somebody else has seen that," Vecellio added. h/t Daily Mail

On Tuesday tracker John Ndayambaje spotted a trap very close to the Kuryama gorilla clan. He moved in to deactivate the snare, but a silverback named Vubu grunted, cautioning Ndayambaje to stay away, Vecellio said.

Suddenly two juveniles—Rwema, a male; and Dukore, a female; both about four years old—ran toward the trap.

As Ndayambaje and a few tourists watched, Rwema jumped on the bent tree branch and broke it, while Dukore freed the noose.

The pair then spied another snare nearby—one the tracker himself had missed—and raced for it. Joined by a third gorilla, a teenager named Tetero, Rwema and Dukore destroyed that trap as well.

The two young gorillas in Rwanda who were spotted taking apart poachers traps  

Science Alert recently re-posted the news and continues the story of the ingenuity of the 4 year old primates.

The researchers suspect that the confidence and speed with which they destroyed the traps means these young gorillas had learnt how dangerous they were, and had dismantled them before.

snip

While adult gorillas are large and strong enough to extract themselves, young gorillas often are not, and if they don't die from being stuck in the trap, they run a very real risk of dying from injuries sustained during their escape, such as dislocated bones and gangrenous cuts.

This is particularly bad news, seeing as the gorillas in this part of the word - a subspecies of the eastern gorilla called Gorilla beringei beringei - are now critically endangered, and the population simply cannot sustain the consistent loss of young gorillas to snares.

The gorillas were spotted near the  Karisoke Research Center, located in the reserve where the event took place.  

The Karisoke Research Center decided not to attempt to teach other gorilla clans how to dismantle the snares declaring that it is “unethical to mess with the gorillas' behaviour to that degree”.

Personally I disagree. To save critically endangered species they must be provided the ability and resources to sustain their populations, and that includes the help of humans when needed as we  have caused the deadly decline in populations in the first place.

x xYouTube Video


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1268

Trending Articles



<script src="https://jsc.adskeeper.com/r/s/rssing.com.1596347.js" async> </script>