Scientists at Oxford Brookes University, England, looked at hundreds of Instagram posts from people visiting the 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 on Tuesday.
“The risk of disease transmission between visitors and gorillas is very concerning,” said lead author Gaspard Van Hamme, an Oxford Brookes University alumnus who began the study during his master’s degree.
“It is vital that we strengthen and enforce tour regulations to ensure that gorilla migration practices do not further threaten these already endangered great apes.”
Mountain gorillas are considered endangered, with an estimated 1063 of them in the wild, according to the release.
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).
Researchers looked at 858 photos posted to Instagram as of 2013-2019 under two hasthtags: #gorillattrek and #gorillatracking, the study said. Of that number, 86% showed people within four meters (13.1 feet) of gorillas, and 25 of those photos showed tourists touching gorillas.
Researchers found that tourists were close enough to the East African primates to allow transmission.
“We found that face masks were rarely worn by tourists visiting gorillas and that this offers the potential for disease transmission between humans and the gorillas they visit,” said Magdalena Svensson, professor of biological anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, in a statement.
The gorillas visiting in the wild were asked to wear face masks even before the pandemic, Svensson told CNN, as part of the “Best Practice Guidelines for Great Ape Tourism,” developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“They are so genetically close to us that they can get most of the things we can get” – like the flu, Ebola and colds, she said.
Now that we know that 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 asked to stay a minimum of seven meters (23 feet) from the animals, but image analysis shows that the average distance has dropped over time.
“It’s a huge health risk for them,” she said, even at a height of four meters (13.1 feet) diseases can be transmitted.
Social media ‘expectations’
Social media and the desire to post a good photo online could be an explanation, Svensson said. “We know how effective social media is in changing people’s attitudes and behavior,” she said.
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, of Conservation Through Public Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting gorillas in Uganda, said, “This study provides a valuable perspective on how many tourists are willing to share their too-close encounters with mountain gorillas through Instagram., Which creates expectations for future tourists. “
“It highlights a great need for responsible tourism to provide adequate protection while minimizing 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, she said.
While there is no evidence to date that wild gorillas developed Covid-19, researchers will continue to monitor visitor behavior, Svensson added.
The research is published in the journal People and Nature.
In January, eight western lowland 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 the public eye after full recovery.