GORILLA
The gorilla is the biggest and strongest of all the monkeys and apes that live today. Explorers were scared when they first found it deep in the tropical forests of West Africa. Its huge arms, huge body, strong jaws, and angry thought scared them so much that all they could think about was how fast they could kill the monster.
When they started shooting their guns and the great male gorillas saw their families hurt and crying out in pain, the explorers had good reason to be afraid. The great males were so angry that they charged their attackers, roaring with rage. Early travellers said that when this happened, the gorillas would use their teeth to crush the barrels of the guns and then tear apart any humans they could catch.
Those travellers who were able to escape and get back home told horrifying stories about brutal, angry giants who were hungry for human blood. Their listeners believed everything they said, and it wasn’t long before the gorilla got a bad name as a dangerous monster.
This image of the animal was to last for a hundred years, until zoologists went into gorilla territory to study them carefully in their daily lives a little over thirty years ago.
With only cameras and notebooks, these scientists just sat and watched for hours and hours. When the family of gorillas moved on, they followed from a distance. They tried to keep an eye on the animals at all times. So, they could keep a “gorilla diary” and get a whole new idea of what these huge animals are like.
How are gorillas in reality? The biggest surprise was when people found out that they weren’t very aggressive but rather very shy. If you leave them alone, they will leave you alone. It is nonsense to think that they are always looking for someone to tear apart. Only if you attack the gorilla family will the big male become aggressive. His actions are always a defence against attack. As the early hunters thought, he didn’t start the trouble. In other words, it is not the gorillas who are brutal, but humans.
Today, you can go on a safari where you can see gorillas. Every year, thousands of tourists like the adventure of hiking through the forests until they find a family of great apes. When they got there, they sat near them and looked at them. They can take pictures of them and watch them this way for hours, and no tourist has ever been hurt or hurt someone else. They can see them, but the gorillas don’t care. The truth is that gorillas are gentle leaf-eaters, even though they have scary faces.
Millions of years ago, their ancestors changed their way of life to eat leaves and chew on stems. These animals got bigger and bigger as time went on. A male gorilla weighs twice as much as a male chimpanzee today. The problem with eating leaves and stems is that they are not very good food. So, leaf-eaters have to eat a lot of plants every day in order to stay alive. Gorillas have to pick and eat their food for six hours out of every twelve hours of daylight. Their lives are ruled by food, and their bodies are even shaped by it.
They need bigger teeth to break through the tough stems and grind up the leaves. To hold the bigger teeth, you need bigger jaws. To open and close the bigger jaws, the muscles have to be stronger. And the bigger muscles need to be attached to bones that are strong. The gorilla looks so scary because of this. For it to be able to feed, its head has to be very big. It has to wear a boney “crash-helmet” not for fighting but for chewing. The big jaw muscles are held in place by the high crest of bone on top of the head. These muscles work all day, every day.
Chimpanzees move around a lot more than gorillas. On average, a family will only move about half a mile a day. Again, this has something to do with the way they eat. The smaller chimps like to eat nuts, berries, and ripe fruits. They have to keep looking far and wide to find these. If they only look for leaves and stems, the bigger gorillas can easily find food everywhere. It’s everywhere around them. They choose the best ones, then move on a little and start browsing again. It’s a quiet and surprisingly peaceful life.
At the end of the day, they sleep wherever they find to be. Because they are so big—males are over 1.5 metres tall and weigh 180 kilograms—they don’t climb trees like their smaller relatives do. Instead, they make beds for themselves out of leaves and twigs on the ground. The mother sleeps with her baby.
They leave their nests in the morning and don’t go back to them. When night comes again, another set of beds will be made somewhere else. There is a good reason for doing this. If they slept in the same nests night after night, pests might be able to stay in their “mattresses” and bother them. So, getting up and moving every day helps them stay clean and healthy.
The fact that they have to live on the ground because of their size also makes them too great for most of the killers who live in the forest. A leopard or a giant python couldn’t find an adult gorilla. Only young animals could be attacked, and their parents are always watching over them. The little ones sometimes play acrobatic games on the branches while their parents take a midday nap, but even when they do this, they never get too far from the family group. When they are born, gorilla gorillas can’t move on their own, so their mothers have to carry them. They can’t crawl until they’ve been alive for three months. They don’t start eating solid food until they are at least three years old. Since the females don’t mate again until after they feed their young, they only have babies once every four years.
When they can take care of themselves, young gorillas leave their family group and go off on their own. This is unusual because it is true for both young males and young females. Most of the time, when animals live in groups, only the young males leave and the females stay with their family group until they die. The kids don’t have to leave, but they choose to. Some animals’ group leader chases away the young males when they are almost grown up, but gorillas don’t do this. This is another example of how peaceful it is for a gorilla family to live together. A typical family group of gorillas has one big male, several adult females, and five or six young ones. The male is called a “silverback” because his colour changes when he becomes the charge of a group. His back turns silver-grey, making it look like he is wearing a light saddle. This makes him stand out from the others, who are all black.
His small “harem” of females, usually only three or four, all come from different family groups and are not related. So, they don’t pay much attention to each other. They only care about their young and about the big male. When the group is resting and there is a lot of grooming going on, the females rarely groom each other. Instead, they spend all their time grooming their young or the silverback.
Again, this makes life peaceful because there are no “junior wives” who need to be kept in line by “senior wives,” as is often the case in the harems of other animals. Instead, each female has her own respected role, and they all share the favours of the male silverback.
Almost all of the fighting that happens in a gorilla’s world is between a silverback male who is in charge of a family group and another male who wants to take his place. When this happens, it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, the whole forest shakes.
The males show they are great by beating their chests, running sideways through the undergrowth, standing on their hind legs, ripping up plants, scattering plants, and making a lot of noise by roaring, hooting, and barking. From these displays, the two competitors can almost always tell which one is stronger. Usually, the weaker one leaves without any blood being spilled.
Gorillas are so strong that even a small touch could easily hurt both contestants so badly that neither of them would live. They can work out their problems without hurting each other in ways that could kill them by using pictures and loud noises.
Even though they are very great and shy, there are not many gorillas left in the world today. There are two kinds: the lowland gorilla with short hair and the mountain gorilla with long hair. It is thought that only about 13,000 of them are still alive in Africa. They are mostly lowland gorillas. Only a few hundred of the beautiful mountain gorillas are left.
The forests that these beautiful animals live in are being destroyed everywhere. The trees are cut down for their wood, and the land is used for farming. Whole areas have been cleaned up to make room for livestock and crops. In 23 more years, the number of people living in West Africa will have doubled. With this increase, there will be an even greater need for land to farm. The gorillas, who are one of our closest animal relatives, will find it hard to stay alive. The big males will beat their chests and roar their defiance, but like King Kong, they will have no defence against bullets. If we don’t find a way to help them soon, one of the most amazing animals on earth, the mighty gorilla, will soon die a sad death.
