A matriarch lives on the slopes of the Virunga Mountains in northwestern Rwanda. Called Mbilimbili, she spends her days with her family group, Kwitonda, which includes 20 or so individuals. Mbilimbili is a mountain gorilla around 40 years old, well within the geriatric range of her species. Her role in the group is manifold: grandmother, mediator, supporter. She commands such respect that even her silverback grandson, a 14-year-old named Kataza, will rest with his grandmother and groom her.
Kwitonda is just one of many gorilla groups studied by researchers at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a research center near Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. Its origins date back to 1967, when famed primatologist Dian Fossey began her two decades in the cloud forest, studying mountain gorillas and urging their conservation until her mysterious murder in 1985. Since then, the Fossey Fund has partnered with universities around the world to continue Fossey’s research and spread the word about this keystone species.
One of the fund’s collaborators is the Primate Behavior Lab in LSA’s anthropology department. Begun by former LSA professor Stacy Rosenbaum, the lab has brought graduate student researchers to the Virunga Mountains since 2021 to study the evolutionary causes and consequences of primate behavior and physiology in the park’s wild mountain gorilla population.
It is human beings who have endangered the mountain gorilla as a species—through slash-and-burn agriculture, poaching, infectious diseases, civil unrest, and the ongoing mineral conflict caused by the demand for rare metals in our electronics. Though the population has grown from a mere 254 individuals in 1981 to around 1,000 now, how can we continue to ensure their survival?
Growing up, Dominic Mayo was the kid dressing as a zookeeper for Halloween. He followed his interest in animals to college at the University of Florida, where he first discovered in an anthropology course that the field included the study of nonhuman primates like monkeys and apes. That semester, a temporary exhibit about the Fossey Fund came to campus.
“I don’t know what other nerds went by the museum alone and checked out Dian’s work,” Mayo recalls, laughing, “but it really inspired me.” When it came time to apply to graduate school, he knew he wanted to see what Fossey had seen. Mayo, who earned his master’s degree in anthropology from LSA in 2024 and is now a doctoral candidate here, focuses his research on the behavior of female mountain gorillas: how they compete for and benefit from access to social resources, like silverbacks that provide protection and infant care. Though his research is in its early stages, he hopes it will advance our understanding as to how female gorillas’ close ties to the silverbacks may help them ensure the survival of their offspring.
McKensey Miller, another doctoral student, discovered her passion for her field of study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she began working in a primate lab as an undergraduate. Following an internship in a Panamanian primate rehabilitation center and a yearlong stint in South Africa working with vervet monkeys, she pursued a master’s degree at Texas State University to study Western chimpanzees in Senegal. Because the chimpanzees lived in temperatures up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit, Miller began thinking about how apes adapted to extreme environments and what that means for their ability to respond to future environmental change. At LSA, Rosenbaum offered her the opportunity to pursue her research questions as they pertained to Rwandan mountain gorillas. Their extremes had more to do with mountain altitudes: the mountain gorillas live at the highest and coldest conditions of any non-human great ape. In her fieldwork, she has observed different thermoregulatory behaviors in the gorillas depending on their specific microenvironment, and she hopes that her research will help better predict how gorillas might be able to respond to climate change.
For recent graduate Ella Brown (Ph.D. ’26), her love of gorillas began when she observed a closely related species, Western lowland gorillas, while working as a zookeeper. “What can we learn from them about humanity?” she wondered. She wrote her dissertation on male mountain gorillas’ hormonal development and physical manifestations of puberty, finding that male gorillas who did not develop conventional signs of maturity like silver back hair still maintained the same testosterone levels as their silverback peers. Brown continues her research as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, where Rosenbaum is now a professor. Brown’s enthusiasm “came from a base of loving animals,” but built on her realization of “what incredible tools for understanding humans these animals can be.”
Like Brown, Mayo and Miller found the significance of their research to be twofold: using the mountain gorilla as a comparative model for the evolution of humans, as well as a pure love for the endangered species. “If we research them for the sake of learning more about them,” Brown says, “that information can be used to protect them.”
Not just anyone can waltz into the Rwandan cloud forest and track down groups of mountain gorillas. In 2022, Brown, Mayo, and Miller all partnered with teams at the Fossey Fund—consisting of trackers, anti-poaching squads, research assistants, and data technicians. The majority of people employed at the Fossey Fund are local Rwandans “who are with the mountain gorillas every single day,” Miller says. “They’re experts who know the gorillas better than anyone.”
When Brown, Mayo, and Miller are doing fieldwork with the Fossey Fund, the day starts at 5 a.m. The researchers and research assistants drive to the research campus to pick up supplies, and then they all head to the mountains. Volcanoes National Park is surrounded by farmland—deforested regions that once were part of the gorillas’ habitat—so sometimes researchers and their guides have to hike through it to get to the park wall.
Upon entering the park, the real work begins. Depending on the location of the desired gorilla group, the hike can be just 15 minutes or up to four hours—and easily up to 3,800 meters (nearly two-and-a-half miles) above sea level. “It’s some of the most arduous physical activity I’ve ever had to do,” Brown says.
The Fossey Fund employs teams that physically track the various groups’ locations every day, following winding trails of crushed plants and fecal deposits. “All we can do is follow that zigzag,” says Brown, noting that the teams have to contend with the dozens of microclimates of the park. Even when researchers aren’t present, the tracking teams face blazing heat and pouring rain in order to log the most accurate data of the gorillas’ health and location.
On a bad day, the gorillas have ensconced themselves in a bamboo grove in the middle of a freezing rainstorm. The researchers can observe a few huddled shapes and some movement, but nothing more.
On a good day, the gorillas are in an open, sunny clearing where the researchers are able to see the whole group together. While the gorillas are habituated to human presence, the teams wear face masks and stay at least seven meters away. “We try to be as invisible as possible,” Brown explains. “If a gorilla is moving towards us and we’re blocking their path, we immediately move out of their way. Within reason, we are not imposing on their space.”
For Brown, Mayo, and Miller, the four allotted observation hours are the most precious of the day. Much of the time, the adult gorillas are either feeding or napping, huddled together like they’re at a sleepover, Mayo says. In his fieldwork, he loved observing an adult female named Inyange, a nine-year-old member of the Pablo group. While she has not raised any offspring of her own yet, Inyange serves as an “auntie” figure to other infants and juveniles in the group. Another female, named Ubukombe, often leaves her baby with Inyange to care for.
Because the gorilla groups are multigenerational, the researchers get to observe all kinds of relationships between individuals of different ages. The infants and juveniles scamper around and play with each other, often under the supervision and with the participation of the stolid silverbacks. Though she originally didn’t start her fieldwork fascinated by the gorillas’ social behaviors, Miller fondly recalls watching mountain gorilla dads serve as patient playgrounds for the younger members of the group. “They’re such good fathers,” she says.
Throughout the day, gorillas of all ages are peacefully feeding and farting—constantly, as a result of their high-fiber diets. “We say they live in this giant salad bowl,” Miller says, indicating the shape of the volcano valleys and their verdant vegetation. At the end of their time each day, the tracker records the last location of the group with a GPS point, and the team makes their way down the mountain.
Mayo recalls one of his first treks, when, at the end of the day, he balked at the prospect of hiking hours back to the park entrance. His guides assured him that they would take a shortcut.
“The shortcut involved literally hopping down the mountain like a goat,” he reflects, laughing. “I’m from Florida. I don’t know how to do this. But there was no better time to learn.”
For primatologists, one of the biggest challenges of the field is trying not to anthropomorphize the individuals they study. “You feel this connection with them that is emotional,” Brown says. “You can’t totally remove yourself from them in that sense because they’re these living creatures that are so similar to humans right in front of you.” Sometimes she finds herself wondering whether one gorilla misses another who has transferred out of the group, or whether certain gorillas feel lonely.
Still, Brown says, part of the responsibility of primatology is objective data collection. “We collect systematic data on their observable actions,” she explains. “We use quantitative measurements so we can take some of the subjectivity out of it.” Brown knows that, though researchers may feel an emotional connection to the mountain gorillas, they will never know what it’s like to actually be one.
Mayo channels his passion for the mountain gorillas through public outreach. During his time in Rwanda, he led tours of the research center to share Dian Fossey’s legacy with visitors to the campus. In addition, he is working on a dissertation with the help of his Rwandan research assistant, Jean Marie Vianney Ndagiwenimana, in an effort to shed more light on this endangered species.
At the end of the day, “it all comes down to saving this species in the wild,” Brown says. As researchers, she and her colleagues know the “sense of familiarity and closeness” that gorillas and human beings share. “It’s a powerful tool for their conservation.”
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