All tagged DianFossey

Female Gorillas Upend the Male Power Narrative

Female Gorillas Upend the Male Power Narrative

Manuela Hoelterhoff & Mike DiPaola
Animal Behavior, Animal Welfare

Gorillas are social animals that live in troops, typically headed by a dominant male, along with several adult females and their offspring. Often a female will leave the troop and relocate – a behavior primatologists call “dispersal.” New research shows that the females tend to seek out other females they already know when they join a new troop, upending a long held view that the males are running the show.

Remembering Fossey, Murdered Author of “Gorillas in the Mist” 

Remembering Fossey, Murdered Author of “Gorillas in the Mist” 

Manuela Hoelterhoff
Animal Welfare, Conservation

“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.”  The last entry in Dian Fossey’s diary is poignant enough without its proximity to the primatologist’s brutal murder in 1985. Fossey was killed in her cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, where she had observed and lived among the silverback gorillas for decades. The killer was never satisfactorily identified – poachers? gold-smugglers? Fossey’s own assistant? – but let’s “dwell less on what is past” and remember her life this week, when she would have turned 91.