Tara Stoinski

Just mountain gorillas.

That's a great question.

And we do know that they're inbred.

Like when we go to do paternity work, we have to get a lot more genetic information to be able to figure out who the dad is than you would in a population that maybe hadn't had so much inbreeding.

And we do see things like we see webbing between their fingers and their toes.

Sometimes they have, we call them wall eyes where their eyes don't line up in the center.

And that's because of the inbreeding?

Yeah, we think it's probably because of the inbreeding.

I think the worry is, of course, if you have a disease that enters into the population and when animals don't have a lot of genetic diversity and you only have a thousand of them, it could be really devastating.

Yeah, other than those things, we haven't seen too much of that.

The good news is over the past decade or so, when I started working in that park, there were seven families of gorillas.

That was in the early 2000s.

Now there's 24 families of gorillas.

Oh, really?

Yes.

They were living in kind of bigger groups, and those groups are fissioning.

But what it means is that more males, because, you know, there's a dominant male in each of those groups—

more males are getting to breed.

So you're sort of spreading out the genetics a little bit more than when you had them living in kind of these super groups of 65 animals.

They do.