Uganda's Mountain Gorillas Increase in Number

The most recent census of mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park—one of only two places in the world where the rare gorillas exist—has found that the population has increased by 6 percent since the last census in 2002, according to the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Max Planck Institute of Anthropology and other groups that participated in the effort.

“This is great news for all of the organizations that have worked to protect Bwindi and its gorilla population,” says Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Alastair McNeilage, who is also the director of the Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation in Bwindi. “There are very few cases in this world where a small population of a endangered primates is actually increasing.”

According to the census, which also successfully used for the first time genetic samples from fecal specimens, Bwindi’s gorilla population now numbers 340 individual gorillas, up from 320 in 2002, and 300 in 1997.

The census was conducted between April and June 2006 to determine the size and makeup of the Bwindi population, in addition to their distribution and to gauge human impacts on the gorillas. During that time, survey teams set out with the intention of counting every family group in the population, a method possible only with small animal populations in a relatively small area; Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is approximately 127 square miles in size.

In addition to census methodologies such as counting trails and nests (gorillas construct a nest each night), researchers used genetic analyses as well, specifically because many of the groups were clustered in the same area of the park, which presented survey teams with the risk of double-counting the same individuals or groups. DNA analysis, however, allowed individuals to be identified and distinguished, even among groups which have never been seen by people.

Fecal specimens were analyzed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Researchers were encouraged by the overall growth of the population, showing an annual increase of one percent over the past decade. The age composition of the population shows a healthy distribution of adult and immature classes, including infants and juveniles. Other findings are that gorillas are not using the eastern side of the park, a possible result of human disturbances there. Particularly encouraging, however, is that one group of gorillas are starting to use the northern sector of the park for the first time in living memory.

Bwindi is also home to a thriving gorilla ecotourism program, which generates much needed foreign revenue for Uganda annually by bringing paying travelers into the company of mountain gorillas. Four of the 30 family groups are habituated for tourism, or conditioned to tolerate the presence of humans for short durations.


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Human Preference for Other Species Could Determine Whether They Survive

As humans exert ever-greater influence on the Earth, their preferences will play a substantial role in determining which other species survive. New research shows that, in some cases, those preferences could be governed by factors as subtle as small color highlights a creature displays.
In the case of penguins, mostly black-and-white flightless birds that live predominantly in the Southern Hemisphere, those most popular with humans appear to be the ones that display markings of warm colors such as red, orange or intense yellow, said David Stokes, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington, Bothell.

He and his undergraduate students calculated the popularity of various species by studying photographs in four large-format photograph books about penguins. Decisions about how many and which photographs to use and how large to make them presumably were made by the books' editors based on their own preferences or on their beliefs of what would appeal to the book-buying public.

"Penguins are lucky because they are popular with people, especially right now. But that's not true of 99.9 percent of the species out there," Stokes says. "Even the penguin species I found to be among the least appealing to people are tourist attractions."

Tops on the list are the Emperors, featured in the film March of the Penguins, and their close cousins the King penguins. Second are crested penguins, including Rockhoppers and Macaroni.
Species at the bottom of the list are Adelie, Yellow-eyed and Little Blue. Stokes was surprised by the relative lack of popularity of Adelie penguins because that species is probably the most familiar to the public.

There are 17 penguin species, and in the past some were hunted for food or boiled to extract their oil. Some species now struggle to survive climate change, changing food patterns and encounters with humans or human activity, such as oil drilling at sea.

The species are fairly similar, with some larger and some smaller, Stokes says. But the ones that appear to be most popular are the ones that display the warmest colors in the upper body, the neck and head. He likened the effect to that of a man in a tuxedo pinning on a red carnation.

No 'cuteness factor'

Unlike some other types of animals, human preference for particular penguin species does not seem to be driven by a "cuteness" factor.

The four books Stokes examined were published in the last decade and were aimed at the popular adult audience. He eliminated photographs from consideration when factors other than the penguins themselves -– the surrounding landscape, for example, or accompanying humans – could have played a role in their selection. He was left with 304 pictures that clearly showed specific penguin species, and he concluded that a species' popularity wasn't because it was easy to get to, or because it had the largest population, or because of similar factors.

"I went to great lengths to ensure that what I was looking at was a purposeful set of pictures and not one just based on logistics," he says. The popularity rankings were similar across all four books, he added, which suggests that human preferences could be widely shared.

The work has been published in the online edition of the journal Human Ecology, and will appear in an upcoming print edition.

Color is not the only factor that determines a species' attractiveness to humans. Characteristics such as size and neoteny – the retention of babyish physical traits such as large eyes and large head – also can play major roles for some animals. Pandas, zebras and elephants, for example, are black and white or gray but are highly preferred by humans. Millions of insects and the countless slimy invertebrates that occupy the oceans are likely not as lucky, Stokes says.

"The work pretty conclusively shows there is a large difference of appeal among organisms, even among closely related organisms," he says. "For different kinds of organisms, different qualities seem to cause differences of appeal."

The work is a signal to conservationists to be mindful of the role of public popularity, and what might cause it, when making decisions about how to deal with various species, even invasive species.

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