Videos of people getting too close to, and touching, the rare apes motivates other people to want to do the same — and that could spread diseases like COVID-19 to a critically endangered species.
Photo: Jonathan Wisner (CC BY 2.0
When the coronavirus pandemic eventually lifts, a lot of things in
our daily lives will finally go back to normal.
Some things, however, may need to change on a more permanent basis.
Take ecotourism, for example. Before the coronavirus hit, thousands
of people a year travelled to Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo for the opportunity to see critically
endangered mountain gorillas in the wild. This was not just a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most tourists. The visits also
generated incredibly popular social-media posts, with some YouTube
videos drawing millions of eyeballs.
But here’s the thing: Tourism is both a boon to conservation efforts
to save these species from extinction and a potential threat.
Mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) are one of our closest
nonhuman relatives; they share about 98% of our DNA, which means we
can also share the same diseases. With only about 1,000 mountain
gorillas on Earth, all of which live in two restricted habitats, a
novel pathogen could rage through and devastate their populations.
Mountain gorillas frequently suffer from viral respiratory diseases,
and wildlife vets often need to dart symptomatic apes with
antibiotics to help them overcome secondary bacterial infections.
Even with those efforts, infectious diseases account still for about
20% of the species’ deaths each year, according to the veterinary
organization Gorilla Doctors.
Could these rare animals also catch a more deadly disease such as
COVID-19? It’s not all that unlikely a scenario, given prior
behavior by tourists. A recent scientific study published in PLOS
One analyzed nearly 300 mountain gorilla videos posted by tourists
to YouTube. More than 200 of those videos depicted humans and
gorillas in the same shots, while 40% showed the two species within
arm’s reach or even making physical contact.
In addition to this lack of respect for physical distancing, only
3.5% of the videos showed humans obviously wearing masks.
These videos were all shot and posted well before the pandemic, of
course — long before masks became the health standard of the day —
but tourism authorities have long known about the risk of conveying
human pathogens to gorillas. All operations — which closed this past
March to protect the animals — already had standards in place that
require tourists maintain at least a seven-meter (23-foot) distance
between humans and apes, and some require masks.
This research shows that not only did people tend to ignore these
standards before the pandemic, the videos that displayed the riskier
behavior — including physically touching the gorillas — were by far
more popular than the ones that depicted safer activity. And as a
result, the number of videos posted has increased every year.
The paper calls this a “negative spiral,” where the videos depicting
unsafe behavior become popular enough to motivate other people to
copy the same behaviors.
Lead researcher Ryoma Otsuka, a graduate student at Kyoto
University, says he was inspired to examine this phenomenon after
seeing these types of videos and his own experience working in
mountain gorilla habitat.
“During my fieldwork in Uganda, I heard that some tourists said that
they wanted to touch gorillas or get touched by gorillas, as they
have seen such too-close human-gorilla interactions in some YouTube
videos,” he recounts. He even witnessed several of these
interactions while he was in the field.
Given that personal history, Otsuka says he expected to find some
videos of unsafe behavior, but the quantity he and coauthor Gen
Yamakoshi uncovered — and their popularity — astonished him.
“It was surprising that there are some videos illustrating very
close interactions and they were getting a lot of views and likes,”
Otsuka says. The most popular videos — some of which have racked up
millions of views — showed humans and gorillas on screen at the same
time, and often involved some manner of contact.
Screen shots of YouTube search results. The study found that
videos received more viewers if the preview images showed both
humans and gorillas in the same shot.
Otsuka is quick to point out that we shouldn’t necessarily blame
individual tourists for this. Mountain gorilla tourism isn’t like a
safari, where visitors watch animals from the safety and seclusion
of vehicles. Instead people make long treks by foot up the mountain
through unfamiliar jungle, and gorillas can be waiting around just
about any turn.
On top of that, gorillas are sometimes the ones who approach humans,
not the other way around.
“Many gorillas have been visited by tourists every day since they
were born,” he says. “Sometimes, some gorillas do come close to you
or just pass near you. So field staff, such as ranger guides and
trackers, and tourists must be very, very cautious about the
distance,” especially since the apes are habituated to human
presence.
A Time for Adaptation
Otsuka says this research reveals the need for mountain gorilla
tourism operations to adapt for these uncertain times and beyond,
when asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers may still be traveling around
the world and carrying the virus with them.
“I don’t know if — or when — mountain gorilla tourism will start up
again,” he says. “If it does, I think much stricter tourism
regulations will be needed. After the pandemic, I think most people
including managers, field staff and even future tourists will need
to be much more concerned about the risk of disease transmissions.”
He adds that the current pause in operations “might be a good time
to rethink the tourism regulations.”
Those regulations are currently inconsistent across the three
mountain gorilla range countries.
“Wearing masks has been proposed for many years in mountain gorilla
tourism,” Otsuika says. “It’s mandatory in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, but not in Uganda and Rwanda. I hope wearing a mask
will be mandatory for anyone who visits if mountain gorilla tourism
starts up again.”
This, he suggests, might require work to see how current regulations
and standards break down in practice. For example, are there any
factors that made it hard to maintain the seven-meter rule, and why
did masks show up in so few videos if they’re required in some
places? He’d like to see workshops with rangers, tourism companies,
lodges and tourists themselves to see what kind of consensus can be
achieved. “It will also help us get a more complete picture of
human-gorilla interactions,” he says.
Of course, the pandemic may have taught at least some of us the need
to continue to wear masks in risky situations, but how that will
play out in the years ahead, and how that will factor into tourism
operations, remains to be seen.
The Rwanda Development Board, which is responsible for gorilla
tourism in that country, did not respond to a request for comment
for this article.
But at least one other organization is already adapting to a
post-COVID world.
“We’ve evolved our procedures since this pandemic began,” says Donna
Gorman, communications specialist for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund,
which conducts research and conservation efforts for the species.
“We were already quite cautious around the mountain gorillas, but we
reduced the number of people in the forest — research was halted,
but protection needed to continue. Masks and gloves, handwashing,
larger distance from gorillas… After each individual gorilla in a
family is accounted for, the team moves 100 meters away. Also, our
tracker teams now stay in the forest for two-week rotations,
reducing the chance they’ll come into contact with the disease or
spread it to the gorillas.”
Social Media Responsibility? Or Just Human Behavior?
On top of changing individual behaviors, should social-media
companies also adapt and discourage people from watching videos that
display unsafe human-animal interactions and could inspire other
viewers to do the same?
There’s precedent, as a push from advocacy organizations has already
inspired one such action in certain cases.
“Instagram heard us and launched a new ‘wildlife warning’ page,
where every time users search for hashtags like #koalaselfie,
#elephantride and #slothselfie a message pops up, informing them
about the animal suffering behind the photos,” says Nicole
Barrantes, a campaign assistant with World Animal Protection, US,
which has also published a Wildlife Selfie Code encouraging people
to pledge to not take wildlife selfies if getting the shot means
getting too close to a wild animal.