The six childhood adversities of childhood that can have long-term negative effects on humans and other animals and even shorten their lives.
However, gorillas that have experienced these early adversities can achieve better survival outcomes as long as they live past the age of 6, and the risk of death in adulthood is reduced by 70% compared with ordinary gorillas.
Childhood suffers more than others in their entire lives
A mountain gorilla was born in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park in 1974. Researchers named him "Titus." For the first few years, Titus, like most gorilla cubs in the wild, was guarded and surrounded by mothers, fathers, siblings, and distant or even unrelated peers who make up the entire community.
However, a tragedy occurred in 1978. Poachers kill Titus' father and brother; In the chaotic circumstances that followed, his sister was killed by another gorilla. Titus' mother fled the community with him and his sister. At that time, he was equivalent to eight or nine years old for humans. Titus experienced more tragedies in the first four years of his life than many animals experienced in their lifetimes.
For humans, early experiences of tragedy can take many forms, including malnutrition, war and abuse. Survivors who experience such trauma are more likely to suffer health problems and social dysfunction as adults, and to live shorter lives. They tend to engage in many health-risk behaviors, such as smoking, poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyles.
Researchers have documented the problems encountered by non-human animals that experienced adversity in their early years in adulthood. For example, female baboons with the most miserable childhood experiences have an average lifespan of only half that of the baboons of the same age who had the best childhood.
Given the link between childhood suffering and poor health later in life, one might think that Titus' unfortunate childhood foreshadowed his unhealthy adulthood and short lifespan. However, there are some interesting signs that the situation of mountain gorillas seems to be different than we expected.
Choice, resilience and adaptation in the face of adversity
The likes of Stacy Rosenbaum, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, and Robin Morrison, an animal behaviorist at the University of Exeter, have long studied gorillas in the wild and observed a wide variety of early life experiences as well as a wide variety of adult health outcomes.
Unlike other primates, mountain gorillas do not seem to suffer any long-term negative effects from the loss of their mother at an early age, provided, of course, that the lactation period is over.
Losing one's mother is just one of many misfortunes that can happen to young gorillas. Scientists want to explore whether gorillas' resilience and adaptability are also reflected in more aspects. If the answer is yes, can we dive into the fundamental question of how early life experiences lead to long-term effects?
To definitively answer these questions, we need very detailed long-term data on the lifetime of wild gorillas. Gorillas live a long life, so this is no easy task. Primatologists are well aware that male gorillas can live into their 30s, while females live to be over 40.
The best data to provide for this research must be the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. For the past 55 years, the foundation has tracked individual mountain gorillas in Rwanda almost daily. Rosenbaum and Morrison's team has worked with the Fossi Foundation to conduct research and has collaborated with other scientists for more than 20 years.
They pulled information on more than 250 gorillas from databases dating back to 1967, which were tracked from the day they were born until the day they died or left the study area.
The research team used the data to identify 6 adverse events that gorillas under 6 years of age could tolerate: loss of motherhood, loss of father, extreme violence, social isolation, social instability, and sibling rivalry. These adversities can have long-term negative effects on humans and other animals.
Many young gorillas fail to rise to the challenge. This is also enough to show that such experiences are indeed detrimental from a gorilla perspective.
Surprisingly, much of the impact of suffering is limited to early life, and gorillas that live past 6 years old are not at great risk of short-lived life like other species that experience adversity in their early years.
Researchers at the Diane Foxi Gorilla Foundation analyzed decades of observational data to determine how gorillas experienced adversity in their infancy later lived later
In fact, gorillas that have experienced 3 or more forms of adversity have better survival outcomes, and their risk of dying as adults is 70% lower than that of the average gorilla. This tenacity, especially in males, may be due in part to viability selection:
Only the strongest animals survive early adversity, so they are also the longest-lived.
On the other hand, the patterns represented by the data strongly suggest that the mountain gorilla is also a species that is highly resilient to early adversity.
Where does gorilla resilience come from?
While the findings by Rosenbaum et al. confirm previous research on gorillas losing their motherhood, they contrast with other similar studies — early adversity in humans and other long-lived mammals. Given all of the above, these studies suggest that the negative effects of early adversity on later life are not universal.
As one of humanity's closest relatives, mountain gorillas' responses to early adversity are expected to provide valuable clues to our own scrutiny, a deeper understanding of the effects of early childhood experiences, and a learning how to overcome them.
It's reasonable to suspect that food-rich habitats, combined with cohesive communities, underpin gorillas' resilience. For example, when a young gorilla loses its mother, other community members fill the gap left by the mother. (How important it is for human children who have experienced adversity in their early years to be supported from multiple sources!) ）
A female mountain gorilla named Ubufatanye lost her parents before she was 5 years old, and now at 20, she is a successful mother who has raised three offspring
What happened to Titus? He led his team for 20 years, had at least 13 offspring and lived to be 35, becoming one of the most successful gorillas studied by the Diane Fauci Gorilla Foundation.
Source:
Thriving in the face of adversity: Resilient gorillas reveal clues about overcoming childhood misfortune
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