Tara Stoinski

All of a sudden, they had a few members die that were kind of the connectors between these two neighborhoods.

And then, you know, they just gradually over time got to the point where now they're going and systematically trying to eliminate the other population.

You could have gone in for 20 years and never would have thought that would have happened.

The same with the gorillas.

Like when Diane was first there, there was a lot of poaching of gorillas.

So there was a lot of infanticide because when a male would get poached, that would give another male an opportunity to come in.

40% of deaths were infanticide.

Then when poaching was eliminated, it was really stable.

And for 15 years, we didn't have a single case of infanticide.

If you were a researcher that came in at that point in time, you would say, oh, gorillas don't commit infanticide.

It's not a reproductive strategy.

Now we're seeing it again, but now it's much more natural.

It's not caused by poaching.

It's just the gorillas figuring out how they're going to sort themselves out.

It's these long windows of time that show us how complicated their society is.

Because if you went in for a shorter window of time, you might make assumptions just because whatever the ecological conditions were back then, they didn't need to fight.

They could spread out, whatever.

And then those ecological conditions change or something changes and we see this whole other side of them that we hadn't observed before.

Right.

Exactly.