Seven-month old female mountain gorilla, Ndakasi, in Goma, DRC.

After Ndakasi recovered from her last bout of diarrhea, we built the orphans a climbing frame out of eucalyptus. It doesn’t look like anything in the forest, but it works. Both infants took to the teepee-like structure immediately. Last week, I watched Ndakasi hang from one arm and twirl about, reaching with her other arm to grasp a stalk of wild celery the caretakers had draped over a crossbeam. A striking change from her condition the day before, when she’d been ill again with liquid watery stool—the reason for my visit.

Approximately 7-month old female mountain gorilla, Ndakasi, in Goma, DRC, eating wild celery.

When Ndakasi’s diarrhea recurred this time, we ran a series of fecal tests—all negative for parasites and pathogenic bacteria. As before, we tried antibiotics and saw immediate improvement. Such a rapid response suggests that her problem is lack of intestinal flora rather than a specific infection. In this case, the antibiotics work by controlling an overgrowth of bacteria. Had Ndakasi grown up in the forest, she would have been exposed to mountain gorilla microbes on a daily basis, enough to populate her gut. Instead, she drinks sterile milk formula and lives in a relatively clean environment.

Ndakasi, left, with Ndeze, right, playing on their climbing structure in Goma, DRC.

Ndeze has the opposite problem, constipation, so much so on some days that she loses her appetite. Because artificial milk formula can be dehydrating, the caretakers routinely offer the infants a bottle of oral rehydration solution between bottle feedings. But Ndeze doesn’t like plain or even flavored fluids. Recently, we decided to dilute her formula and add one more feeding. This strategy seems to help. But perhaps she, too, would benefit from more intestinal flora

Dr. Eddy Kambale, MGVP field vet-DRC, performs a daily exam on the mountain gorilla orphans.

As luck would have it, a family acquaintance of mine, Dr. Caleb King, tracked me down a few days ago. I had no idea that he and his wife—both physicians—run a hospital in Rwanda (Shyira Hill Hospital, http://www.shyira.org/visitors.htm) or that he was a Harvard-trained pediatric gastroenterologist. Now the orphans have another expert on their side! He agreed that the best medicine for both could be something very simple: yogurt, preferably apple-flavored. Apples contain a type of carbohydrate, pectin that helps stabilize the intestinal tract, and the yogurt contains gut-friendly bacteria.

Ndeze needs more space and repeatedly climbs the vine around the guava tree in the Goma house garden.

Watching the orphans in Goma, I found myself distracted by the sounds of radios blaring and children crying. The house, surrounded by a walled garden, sits on a busy street in this town of several hundred thousand people and is far from ideal for a pair of infant mountain gorillas, the first ever to be hand-raised from such a young age. The climate isn’t right, and armed rebels continue to fight the government army on the outskirts of town. 

Both Ndeze and Ndakasi show great interest in the yogurt offered by Dr. Eddy Kambale.

It was time to try the yogurt. Ndakasi tasted it only after Ndeze had taken a spoonful. They seemed to like it, but we won’t know for several days how much of it they’ll eat and how effective it will be. If the yogurt works to reduce intestinal upset, it also could have an effect on stool color by stimulating more digestion and thus releasing bile acids, the chemicals that color the feces brown. That would be an added benefit as both orphans have very light colored stool, which is not normal, even with the addition of forest food to their diet. For now, we’ll have to wait and see.

Chimanuka, silverback of the Chimanuka Group of Grauer’s gorillas in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, DRC.

The next day, I traveled further into the DRC to make my first visit to the habituated eastern plains, or Grauer’s, gorillas in Kahuzi-Biega National Park. MGVP has been monitoring the health of these rare gorillas for over a year, an effort we plan to continue. Although there are thousands of Grauer’s left in the DRC, the only place they are found worldwide, their numbers are rapidly declining due to poaching and habitat loss. Less than 200 live in this particular park, which is set up for tourism. A big difficulty is getting there safely.

Female Grauer’s gorilla in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, DRC.

Though it’s possible to travel by boat along Lake Kivu to the city of Bukavu near Kahuzi- Biega Park, the vets need a truck to get in and out of the park itself. So we drove there from Goma, about 190 km. on a rough road, where at one point we had to pay a man driving a motorcycle taxi to go pick up a battery that could jump-start a truck blocking the way ahead. Then our car broke down in a remote area—at night. Fortunately, a dozen people stopped to help us fix it (six UN trucks drove right by!) But our encounter with the gorillas the next day made the 10-hour drive more than worthwhile.

Subadult Grauer’s or plains gorilla in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, DRC.

In sharp contrast to the sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy, terrain over which we’d traveled, the forest of Kahuzi-Biega National Park felt peaceful and remote. The gorillas crunched their bamboo while the few of us watched quietly. Grauer’s gorillas are larger than mountain gorillas, with longer forearms, a flatter face with less hair around their eyebrows, and wrinkles instead of distinct nose prints. Since they live amid dense vegetation, identifying individuals of this subspecies can be a major challenge.

Freshly logged forest, probably for charcoal production, near Kahuzi Biega National Park, DRC.

I spent the next day traveling near the park as part of a six-person team searching for a possible sanctuary site for the Grauer’s orphans in Rwanda, so that they can go back to their homeland. Our goal was to find a patch of forest that could work as a future semi-wild home for Itebero, Dunia, Tumaini, Ntabwoba, Pinga, and Serufuli. With continued logging and mining in the area, this subspecies faces a future far bleaker than that of the mountain gorilla unless park rules are enforced and tourism can be increased to pay for their protection.

Forest patch in the middle of a tea plantation: a possible future sanctuary site, DRC.

Our selection criteria include security, lack of poaching, proximity to Kahuzi-Biega Park, an accessible road, and any kind of natural boundary that would help keep gorillas in and people out (in addition to a fence.) After viewing several sites that did not meet these specifications, we checked out a patch of forest in the middle of a tea plantation. Had this been a banana plantation, we’d have dismissed it on sight. But as far as we know, gorillas don’t go for tea leaves. We left feeling positive that we’d found a possible site for a DRC Grauer’s gorilla sanctuary, if all goes well. But that’s a big if.

Technorati : Grauer’s gorillas, Kahuzi-Biega National Park, mountain gorillas, orphans