Gorillas are social animals, normally living in groups. There are many special things about these groups.
WHO’S INCLUDED?: In a group of gorillas, there are normally one adult male silverback, up to 3 females, one juvenile male, and 2-3 babies. An adult male has a distinctive hump on its shoulder, with longer front legs. They can up to 250 kilograms and can grow up to 1.6 meters in height. Silverbacks are the senior and leader males.
TERRITORY: A gorilla band’s territory size depends on its ‘population’. A large group may have up to 40 square kilometers, while a small group may only have 5 square kilometers. These chunks of land often overlap, but the bands don’t normally fight.
A group’s territory should provide everything the gorillas need. A male gorilla can eat almost 30 kilograms of leaves a day – as heavy as an 8 year old!
DIFFERENT SUBSPECIES: There are two large subspecies when talking about gorillas. Mountain gorillas and lowland gorillas. Most mountain gorillas are larger than lowland ones, with longer hair to protect them from the wind up a mountain. Lowland gorillas, however, are much slimmer and have shorter hair, not needing that much protection. These two types of gorilla even have different nose shapes. Weird?
CONSERVATION: Mountain gorillas have been declared critically endangered. There are only about 650 of them left in the wild. Most of this was due to habitat loss and poaching. However, there may be up to 2500 eastern lowland gorillas and 40,000+ western lowland gorillas.
Thank you for reading! -Written by EZ
DEC-XZ 