Silverback Imfura took a chance, and ended up alone

There is a Netflix documentary about Imfura, Gicurasi and the Pablo descendents narrated by David Attenborough. It just came out last month. Fantastic doc.

Huh, I went looking into this after reading this story and gorilla culture is interesting. Apparently, gorillas don't have a teaching culture (in comparison to us, I suppose) so during their long growth into adults they have to pick up a lot of cues by observation. This group, in particular, is a famous group called Pablo's group because when it was initially followed the leader was a Pablo, who was soon deposed by a chap named Cantsbee with Pablo remaining on in a non-dominant position. This kind of multi-male system allowed the troop to grow large, and it progressed for two more generations when this chap decided to neither take the Leave And Start Anew nor the Stay And Gently Takeover approach.

Apparently, female gorillas have an effectively large amount of freedom in this scenario and they'll switch tribes if they don't feel they're being effectively led. Lots of interesting stuff in here.

I have this personal theory that Cooperation Ability is the superpower of all living beings and that's how we get bigger things done. You know mitochondria and other cells cooperated and formed modern cells. As things aggregated more we got bigger and bigger beings till the point where we have nation-sized beings. And I notice that many successful societies have strong cultures of internal cooperation, though they might schism, e.g. Abrahamic religions. Anyway, I'm some way through Darwin's Cathedral (recommended to me by an LLM when I asked about this idea) and that book plus the story of this tribe have served to shove me firmly into the land of absolute belief in this idea haha!

This was on Armchair Expert recently, Tara Stoinski. Great episode. Check it out!

Fascinating. How much of this is actually real and how much is people filling in a story that’s not necessarily reality but fits what we humans want to see? It feels very complex and I wonder how anyone can really know what’s happening with the social issues within these gorilla groups.

Also I wonder how much of Imfura’s aggression is due to his earlier trauma. From elsewhere on the same site, written in 2022:

> Imfura has a solid relationship with his father, dominant silverback Gicurasi, who himself had a close partnership with Imfura’s mother before her death. The bond between father and son has been strong since 2011, when then-2-year-old Imfura found himself trapped in a poacher’s snare. He was terrified, screaming in fear as the gorillas around him tried to free him. Our tracker Jean Bosco Ntrenganya was able to cut the rope loose, allowing Imfura to escape, but it took two days for Gicurasi to calm down enough a veterinary intervention to be done to remove the rope that was still attached to the young gorilla’s foot. Imfura survived the trauma and became closer to his father.

His father, who was the dominant male before the current dominant male, died last year. Perhaps it explains some of this?

Relatable