Occasionally, a lone silverback will infiltrate a group with the intention of deposing the reigning silverback and taking control of his harem. A silverback’s leadership ability and the quality of his habitat are important factors in informing the feminine decision. Females put serious consideration in deciding which silverback they should join. The males may travel for years in so-called “bachelor groups,” until they, themselves, become silverbacks and are able to establish their own groups by attracting females. A silverback retains his leadership position for years, and the adult females of his harem (who are unrelated to one another) usually remain with him for life.Ībout 50 percent of a group’s males and 75 percent of its females emigrate from their birth groups when they reach puberty. Each troop is led by an alpha male, a silverback, whose job is to protect the troop’s members he also has mating privileges and breeds with all the females in his group. Of all the gorilla subspecies, theirs is the smallest troop size, consisting of four to eight individuals.
Western lowland gorillas live in small, stable family groups known as troops. Only infants share a nest with their mothers. They are skilled in this practice, constructing a new nest every night. When it’s time to go to sleep for the night, gorillas create nests out of the surrounding vegetation. Besides, grownups need to spend their days foraging for their family so that everyone has plenty to eat. Gorilla moms and dads are simply too heavy to spend much time hanging out in trees with their children-their great girth would cause branches to collapse beneath them-so the treed rainforest habitat provides an awesome playground for gorilla youngsters. Like young human children (before they begin an obsession with cell phones and other electronic devices), gorilla youngsters spend a lot of time chasing one another, climbing trees, and swinging from branches. To help them more effectively gather food, western lowland gorillas fashion rudimentary tools out of sticks and branches, useful in coaxing termites from mounds, for example.ĭaytime is playtime for young gorillas. This swagger might be accompanied by a display of chest-beating, if the situation warrants. However, they are capable of walking upright-a feat that appears to be more of a swagger-for brief periods. Their preferred mode of locomotion is by walking on all fours, or “knuckle walking” (scientifically known as quadrupedalism) that is, they propel themselves forward by walking on the knuckles of their hands and on the soles of their feet. Western lowland gorillas are also the gorilla subspecies most often found in zoos.įoraging for all that fruit they eat takes western lowland gorillas over vast distances. (Although their population numbers are still small, the conservation status of mountain gorillas was reclassified to “Endangered” in 2018 because they are stable and carefully protected). Indeed, western lowland gorillas are more numerous than the other three gorilla subspecies including their Cross River gorilla “cousins” and the two subspecies of eastern gorilla: the mountain gorilla and Grauer’s gorilla, formerly known as the eastern lowland gorilla.īut like most gorillas, western lowland gorillas are Critically Endangered in the wild. Their secluded habitats make it difficult for wildlife biologists to accurately determine how many of these great apes remain in the world, though the total population is thought to be close to 100,000 individuals. The western lowland gorilla is one of two subspecies of western gorilla (the rare Cross River gorilla being the other) and is the most widespread of all gorillas, inhabiting the dense and remote tropical rainforests of Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, and the isolated lowland swampy forests of the Republic of Congo on the African continent.
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