Scientists at Oxford University Brookes, England, examined hundreds of Instagram posts from people visiting animals in East Africa and found that most tourists were close enough to gorillas to spread viruses and diseases, according to a university press release this Tuesday.
“The risk of disease transmission between visitors and gorillas is very worrying,” said study lead author Gaspard Van Hamme, a former student at Oxford Brookes University who began working on the study during the study. your master’s program.
“It is vital that we strengthen and enforce tourist visit regulations to ensure that gorilla hiking practices do not further threaten these already endangered great apes.”
Mountain gorillas are in danger of extinction, and an estimated 1,063 are in the wild, according to the statement.
They live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Virunga National Park), Uganda (Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and Mgahinga Gorilla National Park) and Rwanda (Volcanoes National Park).
The researchers examined 858 photos posted to Instagram from 2013 to 2019 under two hashtags: #gorillatrekking and #gorillatracking, the study said. Of this figure, 86% showed people within four meters of the gorillas and 25 of these photos showed tourists touching gorillas.
The researchers found that tourists were close enough to East African primates to make transmission possible.
“We found that face masks were rarely used by tourists visiting gorillas and this carries a potential for disease transmission between people and visiting gorillas,” said Magdalena Svensson, a professor of biological anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, in a statement.
Visitors to wild gorillas were asked to wear face masks even before the pandemic, Svensson told CNN, as part of the “Good Practice Guides for Big Monkey Tourism” developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“They’re so close to us genetically that they can get most of the things we can get,” such as the flu, Ebola and the common cold, he said.
Now that we know gorillas can catch Covid-19, it’s even more important for visitors to wear a mask, Svensson added.
Svensson told CNN that visitors are also being asked to stay at least seven meters (23 feet) from the animals, but image analysis shows the average distance has been decreasing over time.
“It’s a huge health risk for them,” he said, explaining that even four meters away Diseases can be transmitted (13.1 feet).
“Expectations” of social media
Social media and the desire to get a good photo to post online could be one of the explanations, Svensson said. “We know the effectiveness of social media in changing people’s attitudes and behaviors,” he said.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka of Conservation Through Public Health, a non-profit organization that works to protect gorillas in Uganda, said: “This research provides a valuable perspective on how much tourists are willing to share their encounters too. with mountain gorillas via Instagram, which creates expectations for future tourists. “
“It highlights the great need for responsible tourism to provide adequate protection and minimize disease transmission, especially now during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Kalema-Zikusoka said in the press release.
Svensson stressed that visitors provide valuable financial support for conservation efforts and local communities. The solution is not to stop tourism, but to better educate people about the risks, he said.
While there is no evidence that wild gorillas have developed Covid-19 so far, researchers will continue to monitor visitor behavior, Svensson added.
The research was published in the journal People and Nature.
In January, eight lowland western gorillas living at the San Diego Zoo were found to have Covid-19. The zoo said on Tuesday that the gorilla troop was back in public view after fully recovering.