Scientists Say Ebola Has Pushed Western Gorillas to the Brink

Pushed beyond the brink: Allee effects, environmental stochasticity, and extinction

To understand the interplay between environmental stochasticity and Allee effects, we analyse persistence, asymptotic extinction, and conditional persistence for stochastic difference equations. Our analysis reveals that persistence requires that the geometric mean of fitness at low densities is greater than one. When this geometric mean is less than one, asymptotic extinction occurs with high ...

Ebola outbreak killed 5000 gorillas.

Over the past decade, the Zaire strain of Ebola virus (ZEBOV) has repeatedly emerged in Gabon and Congo. Each human outbreak has been accompanied by reports of gorilla and chimpanzee carcasses in neighboring forests, but both the extent of ape mortality and the causal role of ZEBOV have been hotly debated. Here, we present data suggesting that in 2002 and 2003 ZEBOV killed about 5000 gorillas i...

Conservation biology. Ebola, hunting push ape populations to the brink.

Genetic Evidence that Humans Have Pushed Orang-utans to the Brink of Extinction

For the identification of susceptibility loci in complex diseases the choice of the target phenotype is very important. We compared results of genome-wide searches for linkage or for association related to three phenotypes for alcohol use disorder. These are a behavioral score BQ, based on a 12-item questionnaire about drinking behavior and the subject's report of drinking-related health proble...

Inbreeding among mountain gorillas has no consequences

"The mountain gorilla population has been falling drastically for many years so we wanted to take a closer look at what effect living in such small populations might have had on them and which consequences many years of inbreeding had had. As it turned out, the damaging genetic variations that usually arise in small, inbred populations were not there," says one of the study's co-authors, the ge...