11/14/2023 0 Comments Dian fossey gorilla fund internshipThe data included information about how many of these early adversities each gorilla experienced and at what age, as well as how long each gorilla lived. The researchers identified six different kinds of early life adversity: losing a father or mother, experiencing the death of a group member by infanticide, social group instability, having few age-mates in the social group, and having a competing sibling who was born soon after them. These gorillas live in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, and have been monitored for more than five decades by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. The researchers looked at 55 years of long-term data collected in 253 wild mountain gorillas, 135 of which were male and 118 female. This makes them a good comparative animal model for understanding the ramifications of early life adverse events. Like humans, gorillas live a long time and have a small number of offspring that they heavily invest in. Understanding why and how this happens can have significant implications for our own species, she said. That gorillas show a different pattern suggests these early life adversities can be overcome. For example, they are all eating similar diets, they all get exercise as part of their daily lives, they don't have the opportunity to engage in behaviors with negative health outcomes like smoking," said Robin Morrison, a researcher with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and lead author on the study.īut despite this, in most species it is still the case that early adversity can have negative effects in adulthood, which suggests that there is some kind of deeper biological mechanism there that we don't understand very well, Morrison said. "When you look at animals, you remove a lot of the variation that we have in humans. ![]() Studying these early adverse events in nonhuman species could help researchers understand how such events affect humans, and how to mitigate them. But in humans, it's difficult to tease out whether we, for example, develop cancer or die early as adults because of an adverse event early in life per se, or whether it's because of a multitude of behavioral, environmental and cultural factors - or a combination of all of the above. Like other species, humans also deal with early life adversity, and the effects of this can follow us into adulthood, such as a shorter lifespan or health complications, Rosenbaum said. The study is published in the journal Current Biology. "There's this whole range of things that happens to you that seems to just make your life worse in adulthood."īut instead, the researchers found that gorillas who survived past age 6 were largely unaffected by difficulties they encountered as infants or juveniles. "Assuming that you survive something that we consider early life adversity, it's often still the case that you will be less healthy or you will have fewer kids or your lifespan will be shorter - no matter what species you are," said U-M anthropologist Stacy Rosenbaum, senior author on the study. But losing your mother is only one of many potential bad things that can happen to young animals. ![]() Previous studies by the Fossey Fund revealed that young gorillas are surprisingly resilient to losing their mothers, in contrast to what has been found in many other species. ![]() When researchers from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and the University of Michigan decided to look at this question in gorillas, they weren't sure what they would find.
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