Gorilla Tag Map Download
Amintor Robillard
Our western lowland gorillas share their expansive outdoor habitat with a small family of red river hogs. The gorilla habitat is large, and the gorillas have an indoor habitat as well, so you may not see them on camera all the time.
Many people like to compare gorillas with humans, but there are several differences. Although they are able to stand upright, gorillas prefer to walk using their hands as well as their legs. Their arms are much longer than their legs, and gorillas can use the backs of their fingers like extra feet when they walk. This is called the knuckle walk.
Gorillas are generally peaceful creatures, but sometimes a younger male from another troop challenges the silverback. To scare unwanted gorillas away, he beats his chest with cupped hands to make a loud noise, screams, bares his teeth, and then charges forward. Sometimes he breaks off branches and shakes them at the intruder. It is an awesome display!
Young gorillas learn by imitating what the others in the troop are doing and by play fighting with other youngsters. Even the stern silverbacks are gentle with the little ones as they practice new skills. A young gorilla stays close to its mom, sharing her nest, until it is four to six years old. Gorillas have been known to nurse for up to three years.
Gorillas have no natural enemies or predators, yet these peaceful creatures are at critical risk because of humans. People hunt gorillas for food called bushmeat, and logging and mining companies destroy gorilla habitat. The recent armed conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has caused refugees to pour into previous gorilla habitat. Disease epidemics such as the Ebola virus have recently decimated gorilla populations that were previously considered secure within their natural habitat.
The past 15 years have seen a dramatic decline in gorilla population size, with almost half of the entire eastern gorilla population suspected to have been wiped out. Illegal hunting has become a lucrative activity in the region. While hunters often lay snares targeting other mammals, sadly, many gorillas die or lose limbs after being accidentally ensnared. An illegal pet trade is also on the rise. Behind each infant gorilla caught by poachers, several family members are often killed.
The critical conservation status of gorillas underscores the urgency for gorilla conservation science. In collaboration with wildlife managers and conservation scientists in countries where gorilla populations survive, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is involved in the training of range-country conservation scientists in the application of genetic tools and field methods in assessing and monitoring surviving gorilla populations. Performing the first genetic studies on populations of mountain gorillas, it was discovered that regionally, these gorillas are genetically distinct.
Genetic differences were also found within western lowland gorilla populations, which had been considered a single subspecies. By gathering and analyzing fecal samples from gorillas, conservation scientists from San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and wildlife authorities and conservationists in Uganda, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Cameroon can shed light on the genetic variation across regions.
Africa may seem far away, but there are some things you can do to help! When you buy wood or furniture, ask if the wood has been certified. This means the wood was taken in a way approved by forestry experts. Buying certified wood encourages logging companies in Africa to follow wildlife laws that help protect gorillas and other African wildlife.
Did you know that cellphones have a connection to the well-being of gorillas and other wildlife in central Africa? Here's the 411: cellphones contain a rare ore called coltan (short for columbite-tantalite). This metal is found in central Africa, and increased mining operations to get the coltan means habitat loss and increased hunting pressure on gorillas and other wildlife. Surprisingly, wildlife reserves suffer most from mining. With the increased popularity of cellphones, thousands of illegal miners have invaded the protected parks. Needing food, they have hunted gorillas and elephants to near extinction in these areas.
(A) Distribution of gorilla subspecies (2). (B) Gorilla taxonomy. (C) PCA plot of SNP data for all four gorilla subspecies. (D) PCA plot of SNP data from mountain and eastern lowland gorilla samples only. (E) mtDNA and Y-chromosomal phylogenies. Node heights are in units of substitutions per base pair; each tree is drawn to a separate scale.
(A) LD decay (15) in gorilla and human populations. Human samples are Utah residents with European ancestry (CEU) or Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria (YRI). (B) Mean per-sample genome fractions found in homozygous tracts. Open bars show total fractions for mountain (Gbb), eastern lowland (Gbg), Cross River (Ggd), and western lowland (Ggg) gorillas; solid bars show fractions in tracts of length 2.5 to 10 Mb (gorillas) or 2.5 to 10 cM in an Altai Neandertal and two human individuals [Karitiana (Kar) and Papuan (Pap)] (19). Error bars are 1 SD.
Mountain gorillas spend about a quarter of their day eating, mainly plants. Around 85% of their diet is made up of leaves, shoots and stems, but gorillas can also eat larvae, snails, ants, and even roots, barks and rotting wood (a good source of sodium/salt).
Most mountain gorillas live in stable family groups of around 10 individuals, with one dominant male and several females. Both males and females in the group care for their infants; hugging, carrying and playing with them.
Originally constructed in April 2004, Hubbard Gorilla Valley allowed the Zoo to become a major partner in gorilla conservation. Through the continued commitment and generosity of donors, it has been updated with an African Jungle theme and enhancements that reflect the Zoo's immersive and educational style.
Humans share many elements of their anatomy and physiology with both gorillas and chimpanzees, and our similarity to these species was emphasized by Darwin and Huxley in the first evolutionary accounts of human origins1. Molecular studies confirmed that we are closer to the African apes than to orang-utans, and on average closer to chimpanzees than gorillas2 (Fig. 1a). Subsequent analyses have explored functional differences between the great apes and their relevance to human evolution, assisted recently by reference genome sequences for chimpanzee3 and orang-utan4. Here we provide a reference assembly and initial analysis of the gorilla genome sequence, establishing a foundation for the further study of great ape evolution and genetics.
We also collected less extensive sequence data for three other gorillas, to enable a comparison of species within the Gorilla genus. Gorillas survive today only within several isolated and endangered populations whose evolutionary relationships are uncertain. In addition to Kamilah, our analysis included two western lowland gorillas, Kwanza (male) and EB(JC) (female), and one eastern lowland gorilla, Mukisi (male).
In several cases, a protein variant thought to cause inherited disease in humans32 is the only version found in all three gorillas for which we have genome-wide sequence data (Supplementary Table 8.9). Striking examples are the dementia-associated variant Arg432Cys in the growth factor PGRN and the hypertrophic cardiomyopathy-associated variant Arg153His in the muscle Z disk protein TCAP, both of which were corroborated by additional capillary sequencing (Supplementary Table 8.10). Why variants that appear to cause disease in humans might be associated with a normal phenotype in gorillas is unknown; possible explanations are compensatory molecular changes elsewhere, or differing environmental conditions. Such variants have also been found in both the chimpanzee and macaque genomes3,33.
We carried out an analysis of hominine transcriptome variation using total RNA extracted and sequenced from lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) of one gorilla, two chimpanzees and two bonobos (Supplementary Information), and published RNA sequence data for eight human individuals34. After quantifying reads mapping to exons and genes in each species, we calculated the degree of species-specific expression and splicing in 9,746 1:1:1 expressed orthologous genes. On average, expression levels in human and chimpanzee were more similar to each other than either was to gorilla (Supplementary Fig. 10.2). However this effect is reduced in genes with a higher proportion of ILS sites, which tend to show greater expression distance between humans and chimpanzees (Fig. 3a). More generally, patterns seen in the relative expression distances between the three species showed a significant overlap with those derived from genomic lineage sorting (P = 0.026; Supplementary Table 10.4), demonstrating that ILS can be reflected in functional differences between primate species.
a, Mean gene expression distance between human and chimpanzee as a function of the proportion of ILS sites per gene. Each point represents a sliding window of 900 genes (over genes ordered by ILS fraction); s.d. error limits are shown in grey. b, Top row, classification of CTCF sites in the gorilla (EB(JC)) and human (GM12878) LCLs on the basis of species-uniqueness; numbers of alignable CTCF binding sites are shown for each category. Bottom three rows, sequence changes of CTCF motifs embedded in human-specific, shared and gorilla-specific CTCF binding sites located within shared CpG islands, species-specific CpG islands or outside CpG islands. Numbers of CTCF binding sites are shown for each CpG island category. Gorilla and human motif sequences are compared and represented as indels, disruptions (>4-bp gaps) and substitutions.
We also explored species specific variation in splicing35 by calculating the variance in differential expression of orthologous exons within each gene. In total we found 7% of genes whose between-species variance is significant at the 1% level (based on the distribution of within-human variances, Supplementary Fig. 10.5). For example, Supplementary Fig. 10.6 illustrates gorilla-specific splicing in the SQLE gene, involved in steroid metabolism.
760c119bf3