Mountain Gorillas Studied by Dr. Dian Fossey

The mountain gorillas ar essenti everyy vegetarians who gain their subsistence by foraging on the mountainsides. Fossey included a list of food vegetation types used by gorillas in study meetings 4, 5, 8 and Nunkie's sort. These included ferns, sedge grass, flowers, shrubs, trees, vines, and parasites. For example, under herbaceous plants, Fossey listed carex, cineraria, cynoglossum, helichrysum, lobelia, rumex, senecio, solanum, thalictrum, and urtica, among others. The gorillas move from a wide variety of plants, and occasionally ate grubs. They were, however, virtually exclusively vegetarian. She noned that there were particular governs, with the giant lobelia z sensation at 11,480 to 12,465 feet on Visoke's upper slope, for example.

This really was the focus of Fossey's work. harmonise to her, gorillas had closelybonded kinship roots that were led by an older, be on, silverback male. These family groups woulddefend any of their members to the death, which was part of the problem Fossey had to deal with in regard to poachers. If poachers act to capture one member of the family grouping, they generally had to kill all the other members of the family to get that one away.

Fossey emphasized that no group could remain a distinct social unit without the leading of the mature silverback male. However, outside of that, groups had vary

Fossey, D. (1983). Gorillas in the mist. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

ing composition. For awhile, one of the groups was composed exclusively of males, including more than one sexually mature male. Some of those males eventually left the group and the oldest silverback acquired a new female, with an infant born several months later. That group then consisted of Rafiki, the old silverback, his new female, infant, and adolescent son.

There is nonentity analogous to warfare among the mountain gorillas, although there is considerable appointment and aggression.

The conflict seems to exist primarily between groups in few competition for the working out of the various groups. For example, Fossey recounted an occasion in which Rafiki obtained two new females from Group 4 during a violent corporeal conflict. At that time, one of the gorillas received a permanent stain from a bite wound.

 However, in many instances, older silverbacks, alike Nunkie, seemed to be able to obtain new group members relatively easily, without having to fight for them or hurt other individual gorillas. During the changes in gorilla groups, however, infanticide is frequently a result. This seems to be associated with an evolutionary nonplus to accentuate one's own gene pool, while limiting the expansion of another gorilla's. Or, it could be related to the fact that the infant gorillas are less productive for the group either reproductively or in conflict with other groups.

Sexually mature males do deal for the female gorillas, often having more than one sexually mature female in their group. Sexually mature males who do not have females of their own, or lead a
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