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 geneticist Christina Hvilsom, a Ph.D from Copenhagen Zoo. She hopes that the results can give scientists some new tools to fight against the mountain gorillas’ extinction.