Tara Stoinski

Now, lots of gorillas have had bad early life experiences and they're just fine.

But we're actually doing a big study right now where we're comparing the gorillas with the Gombe chimps from Jane Goodall and then another population of chimps that are in the same forest as the Ngogo chimps, but it's in a different area.

They're called the Kinyawara chimps.

And we're really interested in looking at

early life adversity and what that means for later life outcomes because the gorillas amazingly seem to be much more buffered when something happens to them early on probably because they have this really tight community that the chimps don't have and i feel like you see that a lot in chimp empire i'm re-watching it i'm like god these guys feel so alone oh they're so

Whereas the gorillas are just with each other all the time.

They're a cohesive unit.

They stay together.

And we were able to show that if a young gorilla loses its mom, it actually spends more time near other gorillas because everyone kind of comes and buffers them.

And I've thought about this a lot with my daughters, having lost a parent.

And what is the community you need to build around them to give them that social buffering that hopefully will help?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if a male chimp loses its mom even up to the age of 15, so they're weaned at five.

So they're nutritionally completely independent.

If they lose their mom up to the age of 15, they have a shorter life expectancy than a chimp that doesn't lose its mom.

And we don't see this with gorillas.

And in fact, some of our most successful gorillas, Pablo lost his mom when he was four.

Right.

And Titus had lost his mom.

He lost his whole family.