![]() He will join the Saint Louis Zoo’s bachelor group of gorillas, Joe, 25, and Bakari, 18, at Jungle of the Apes. Zachary was born at Brookfield Zoo in 2015 where he has been living with his family at Tropic World. Credit JoEllen Toler/Saint Louis Zoo Zachary and the Gorilla Bachelor Group The primate care team is going to miss him greatly, but is very excited for this new chapter in his life.” Jontu. “Despite his stature and serious demeanor, he has a very playful and gentle side. “Jontu is well known at the Saint Louis Zoo for his regal appearance and confidence as a leader in the bachelor group,” said Helen Boostrom, Zoological Manager of Primates, Saint Louis Zoo. ![]() In June 2022, Saint Louis Zoo male gorilla, Nadaya (Nah-DIE-ya), moved to Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington, to start his own family. Jontu came to the Saint Louis Zoo in 2005 from Columbus Zoo where he was born in 1997 and has been a part of a bachelor gorilla group at the Zoo’s Jungle of the Apes since his arrival. He will be joining a group with females to provide stability for the family at Brookfield Zoo. This move was made with plans of strengthening the western lowland gorilla population by providing Jontu the opportunity to lead a family group. ![]() The recommendation took into consideration Jontu’s personality and genetics. Louis to Chicago was based on a breeding recommendation by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) Species Survival Plan (SSP) for western lowland gorillas, a conservation breeding program that manages a genetically healthy population of this species in North American zoos. The gorillas are currently staying in private areas of their new homes at each zoo and not yet in view of guests. Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.Two male western lowland gorillas - 26-year-old Jontu of Saint Louis Zoo and 7-year-old Zachary of Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, Illinois - recently swapped hometowns in the name of conservation and survival of this critically endangered species.Įarlier this week, Jontu (JOHN-too) arrived at Brookfield Zoo and Zachary arrived at Saint Louis Zoo. “They’re still an important reservoir of genetic diversity within the species,” she says. This settles a long-running debate about the question, and clarifies the importance of conserving mountain gorillas despite their inbreeding. The genome sequences show that mountain gorillas are indeed genetically distinct from the eastern lowland gorilla. Scally’s study makes a big contribution to conservation, says Gonder. Further study will be needed to show whether the lack of genetic diversity could still leave mountain gorillas more vulnerable to disease and other challenges, she says. That conjecture is plausible, but not yet proven, says Katy Gonder, a geneticist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “There’s no reason to suspect that they’ve gone past some genetic point of no return,” says Scally. If so, conservation biologists may have one less problem to worry about as they try to preserve mountain gorillas. This prolonged small population may have allowed evolution to purge the gorillas’ genomes of the most harmful mutations tens of thousands of years ago, thus reducing the present-day genetic cost of inbreeding. Populations of mountain gorillas plummeted about 100,000 years ago and have remained low ever since, they found. This enabled them to estimate how gorilla population sizes have changed over the past few million years. To understand why, the researchers scanned the gorillas’ genomes for genetic markers of low populations in the past. High levels of inbreeding increase the odds that an individual will get copies of a harmful mutation from both parents, and thus the risk of genetic disease.īut the team show that both mountain and eastern lowland gorillas actually carry fewer of the most harmful mutations, those that knocked out gene function completely, than their more common cousins, western lowland gorillas. “It’s more inbreeding than we’ve seen so far in any other great ape,” says Scally. The gorillas were even more inbred than they expected, roughly the equivalent of the result of a mating between great-uncle and great-niece, they found.
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