- On a warm spring day, 30 year old Mokolo chows down
on specially chosen leafy greens
at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
Seemingly undisturbed by a crowd of kids
and adults who eagerly watch him, snapping pictures,
wide-eyed in awe at his size, and his laid-back personality.
He's one of four western lowland gorillas,
a species native to western Africa
at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, and he's the only male.
- I think the exciting thing for people
is seeing our group interact with each other.
If you stand here and watch them long enough,
you can tell who's in charge and who's not,
and you can really understand
their relationships with each other.
- Tad Schoffner works as an animal curator at the zoo,
and has a special interest in the group's interaction.
He facilitated the introduction of Nneka,
the zoo's third female gorilla
from San Francisco just last month.
- We had a very quick integration, and quarantine,
and got her into our group of four now, and so,
she joined our male Mokolo,
and our females Fredrika and Kebi Moya.
I've been here for quite a while.
I've been mostly used to our bachelor gorilla group
that we had for 20-some years,
and getting females back was really exciting.
- The Cleveland troop's makeup changed in early 2017,
following the death of Mokolo's longtime partner Bebac,
a 32-year-old male who suffered from heart disease.
He had lived alongside Mokolo
since the younger gorilla's birth,
the duo arriving in Cleveland together in 1994.
A color-coded chart arrayed with dots and squares
occupies the largest part of one wall
in Kristen Lukas' office.
We're inside the zoo's
Sarah Allison Steffee Center for Zoological Medicine,
and the old-school chart is critical
to the breeding and transfer recommendations
for 350 gorillas housed at zoos across North America.
In addition to a role,
as the director of conservation and science
at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo,
Lukas leads the gorilla species survival plan
for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums,
a consortium of more than 230 wildlife preserves
in America and around the world.
- Each year, we look at the entire population,
and try to make the best decisions
for the longevity of the population,
so that it's sustainable.
We're looking out 100 years in the future,
to make sure that we have a genetically fit population,
and one that will carry on for many years.
And then, also looking out for individual animal welfare.
Lukas and her team have been
on a discovery mission over the past decade,
culling data to determine why heart disease
is so prevalent among captive gorillas,
especially compared to their wild counterparts.
More than 45% of gorillas in captivity
are known to have heart disease,
and it's the leading cause of death among males.
- Across the AZA population, we have this knowledge
that adult males tend to get heart disease,
and because, oftentimes, we would find that out
when we would anesthetize an adult male,
the animal might have trouble under anesthesia,
or may die under anesthesia.
So, while we were trying to investigate heart disease,
we ran into this challenge of,
nobody wants to do exams on their animals,
nobody wants to anesthetize an adult male.
So, it took a huge push of a lot people saying,
"We really need to figure this out."
- Pam Dennis, a veterinary epidemiologist,
works just down the hall from Kristen Lukas.
She studies the health of populations.
- Mokolo hadn't had an exam for many years.
We looked at him, we did physical exams,
but we didn't have him under anesthesia,
until there was this big invigoration of people to say,
"Let's look at this."
- But, when they did, Dennis, Lukas,
and the rest of the staff in Cleveland
received a dreaded confirmation,
Mokolo, too, has heart disease.
- Once we knew he had heart disease,
then we could manage it.
We needed the information,
not only to get the diagnosis on him,
but to define heart disease,
in a living animal, versus on pathology.
It can be a little scary, because we're asking questions
that involve the health of individual animals that we know,
and we don't always know
whether we're asking the right questions,
but we have to actually be able to study it and measure it,
to demonstrate whether the changes that we make
actually make a difference.
- Since Mokolo's diagnosis, nearly 10 years ago,
staffers in Cleveland have trained the 400 pound animal
to stand still for voluntary awake cardiac ultrasounds,
which give far more accurate readings.
- It's really amazing to think that you could ask a gorilla
to put his chest up against the mesh,
and keep his hands at a safe distance,
and then to be able to put a probe onto his heart
and get an awake ultrasound, so that you can actually see
what's happening with his heart.
But, that's exactly the kind of work that we do here
at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, through operant conditioning,
or positive reinforcement training.
- What have we learned by doing that,
being able to really do a physical exam
on the animal any time you want?
What do we learn?
- We are able to monitor their health
on an ongoing basis in a way
that is not in any way stressful for them or intrusive.
So, for example, once we knew
that our gorilla had heart disease, we were able to identify
what the baseline heart rate was for that animal.
We were able to identify what the heart is
supposed to look like for this individual animal,
and then, we were able to monitor that over time,
in the same way that a human might
take their blood pressure on a regular basis.
- That data is then shared with other institutions, by way
of the Great Ape Heart Project, a national collaboration
investigating cardiovascular disease.
- You can only imagine, if you went to your doctor
with a problem with your heart,
and they just didn't know what was normal,
or how to diagnose a problem, or even,
once you identify the problem, how to treat it,
and even more importantly, how to prevent it.
So, there are a number of different groups
working along the side with the Great Ape Heart Project,
trying to understand things
from all of those different perspectives,
and Cleveland Metroparks Zoo has focused a lot
on diet and nutrition, in addition to
really trying to understand what are the some of the ways
that we can not only prevent the escalation of heart disease
in a gorilla that's already been diagnosed, but also,
perhaps, even prevent it, for gorillas in the future.
- In their journey to better understand heart disease,
staff in Cleveland, led by Elena Less,
a Case Western Reserve University Ph.D student at the time,
started with the gut, looking at the influence
of a captive gorilla diet on overall health.
- The gorilla diet, previously,
was based primarily on a biscuit.
And, if you imagine what dog food is like,
it's formulated so that it provides the animal
with all of its essential vitamins, nutrients,
but, we've learned, both in human nutrition
as well as in wildlife management, and zoos,
that, oftentimes, processed diets
are not in the best interest of all the animals.
And so, this is a question we had,
and we were curious both to know if we replaced that biscuit
with other food items that might provide the same nutrients,
but feed a gorilla more like a gorilla should be fed,
but internally and also behaviorally.
We worked with veterinarians and nutritionists
from all over the country for well over a year
to formulate a diet that we felt would work
and that could be acceptable
to the animals here at Metroparks Zoo.
- The gorillas new diet
includes leafy greens, high in fiber.
The team notice changes almost immediately.
Changes, involving longer feeding times,
allowing for more natural gorilla behavior,
comparable to the amount of time they would spend eating
were they still in the wild.
- Gorillas, at many zoos, regurgitate their food
after their finished, and they re-eat it,
and that behavior has always stumped me.
Why are they doing this?
What was amazing was that,
as soon as we transitioned to this new diet,
that behavior completely stopped in our gorillas.
We knew we were onto something.
Something is fundamentally changing,
that now that we have extended the feeding time,
and we think we are feeding their hind gut,
their hind-gut fermenters.
We think something has fundamentally changed
that has altered their behavior.
So, we saw that right away.
It was absolutely an 'A-ha!' Moment.
We learned how to completely eliminate this behavior
that had been an issue for many zoos for many years.
One of the things that we were able to do
with the change in diet, is we were able to feed them,
quantity-wise, a lot more, lower calorie concentration,
but they actually have to move around more
to get their food.
- With regurgitation eliminated,
Dennis hopes that by studying gorilla's digestive tracks,
scientists might be able to gather more clues,
clues which could aid in prevention and treatment.
That's done by looking at microbiomes,
an ecological community, of sorts,
found in the animal's feces.
- So, we think of feces, poo, as a waste product,
but, really what it reflects is,
what's going on in the GI tract,
and in human health and in veterinary medicine,
we're really just starting to get a handle on this.
What we were hoping was
that we could look at the heart disease
versus non-heart disease,
and the standard diet versus the new diet,
low-starch high-fiber diet, and we hoped to see
that the low-starch high-fiber diet microbiome
would better reflect that of the healthy gorillas.
But, what we found was,
and this is why I'm particularly excited about it,
is that, if you look at the low-starch, high-fiber diet
compared to the standard zoo diet, that, roughly,
mimics the gut microbiome from humans,
healthy versus diabetic.
And, one of the questions that I have is,
insulin resistance, which is essentially,
the body is not responding to insulin that's being produced,
it's sort of a pre-diabetic state,
could be an underlying cause of heart disease in gorillas.
And so, this is a tiny little grain of information
that gets us one tiny, little baby step closer
to figuring out how all of this interacts.
- Zoo executive director Chris Kuhar says,
because of the work here, an increasing number of zoos
are coming to Cleveland for answers and ideas.
- Other AZA facilities are now implementing the diet
that we started here, implementing a lot of the training
and husbandry techniques that we've used here.
Using cardiac ultrasound training
to be able to do that on an awake gorilla.
Those are new procedures, new processes, new techniques,
that we're ground-truthing here,
and a lot of the research that we're implementing here,
folks are watching.
They're looking to see what the success is,
and they're taking those ideas
and holding Cleveland as a model
for how they manage they gorillas moving forward.
- I think given the challenges
of the questions we're trying to ask,
we are making great strides,
and it's really energy generating
to work with such a passionate group of people
who are not only passionate
about making a difference for the animals,
but really excited about the science,
and being able to use that
to inform how we take care of these animals.
We want to make a difference for the individual animal,
and, indirectly, for the entire population.
We want there to be future generations of gorillas.
We want them to be healthy.
They're in our care.
For us to know they have heart disease,
and not figure it out, we can't do that.
- The zoo recently introduced a new outdoor gorilla habitat,
adding climbing structures,
and exponentially increasing the square footage,
allowing more room for activity.
Considerations about conservation
and the health of the animals
were included with each update,
to exhibits like this one and others throughout the zoo.
- A lot people still have that vision
of what zoos are in their head
when they think of the word zoo,
and quite honestly, it's changed drastically.
We've gone from being a consumer of wildlife,
extracting wildlife from the wild, to organizations
that strive for sustainable animal populations,
and are actually doing a lot of work,
putting resources back into the communities
that we were once withdrawing them from.
We've become conservation organizations,
and we're just in the process now
of really telling that story in a better way,
to our visiting public.
- A public that is also on a learning curve,
not just regarding
the critically-endangered mountain gorilla,
but about other species,
and with that education, spurred by members
of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums comes hope.
- Conservation isn't a longterm strategy,
conservation is an emergency strategy at this point.
We've gotta get in and protect.
When you're talking about gorillas where there's animals
in the numbers of the hundreds
in terms of mountain gorillas.
That's not something we can plan for 20, 30, 40 years,
we've gotta do something right now.
And, what we wanna do is, empower people.
Help people understand what they can do,
give them a reason to participate,
and inspire them to participate,
and part of that is changing out exhibits.
- Changing exhibits is one measure,
changing minds is another.
But, the shift is coming, albeit slowly.
Latest census findings indicate
the mountain gorilla population increasing,
with Cleveland intimately involved in the effort,
through a longstanding relationship
the Dian Fossey Fund, which operates in Rwanda
and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Dr. Lukas makes regular trips to Rwanda,
helping train university students there
to become the next generation of conservationists.
While, here at home, we watch, and hope
for the next generation of Kristen Lukases.
- So, my dream is that, as the gorillas grow up,
and we are able to provide
the most healthy food environment,
physical environment, social environment for them,
then they will continue to inspire our kids, my own kids,
and others, to understand what gorillas are
and why they are so special and significant.
- Special, significant, and revered
for what our ape relatives can teach us,
while we do what we can do save them.
Mokolo, Freddy, Kebi, Nneka, and hopefully, thousands more.
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