On Wednesday 23rd March, Forum 42 held a talk in the Princess Hall by Dr Liz Rogers. I was extremely excited to attend this talk, as I am very passionate about animals and zoology, and animal conservation is a topic that I am very interested in.
The talk was about Dr Rogers’ experiences and challenges when it came to studying the socio-ecology of the western lowland gorillas of Gabon, as they were very hard to see and study, amongst the dense forests. At the beginning of the talk, Dr Rogers talked about the stereotypical views of gorillas as violent beasts. However, she reassured us that these views were very unflattering and inaccurate and I liked the way that she overcame these stereotypical views in her talk by clearly demonstrating how gentle and civil these creatures are through her own experiences.
I found the pictures that she used in her presentation interesting, as this made the whole talk feel as if we were all part of her fantastic adventure, navigating through the dense forests of Gabon.
Dr Rogers went through many different aspects of her adventure, talking about what they studied and how, where they went, the different things they saw, their big breakthrough (where they actually saw western lowland gorillas in the open), the dangers faced by western lowland and mountain gorillas, gorilla tourism, and a mountain gorilla group with a silverback male leader called Titus.
The theme of the talk was to inform us how she and her team studied an ‘invisible’ animal and I was very interested in the ways that they were able to do this. They observed footprints, nests, feeding signs, such as broken branches, and trails. I learned that each individual gorilla builds a nest and so, using a specific equation, they could calculate the population density. They used DNA sequencing from hairs left in the nests to find relatedness between different gorillas and observed faeces in nest sites, to get an idea of their diet. Overall, Dr Rogers’ extremely informative talk was fantastic; she was a very captivating speaker and I have certainly learnt a lot more about gorillas. Her light sense of humour and her clear passion for her career made the talk even more enjoyable.
Sofiya, LC3 (Year 9)
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