Newly form gorilla group in Rwanda to get a name

Rwanda will be holding this year’s Kwita Izina ceremony on 22rd June from Musanze and it is organized by the Rwanda Development Board’s department of tourism and conservation. This year’s ceremony will be the ninth of the kind and will see over 12 baby gorillas aged between two weeks and eleven months old get names, the oldest of them was born on July 3 last year while the youngest on May 21 this year and more to this, the newly formed gorilla group which is headed by a male gorilla called Getty will also be given a name.

In additional to this recently added group, Rwanda now has got  eighteen gorilla-groups, ten of which are  for tourism and eight for research but these babies that are yet to be named belong to nine different gorilla families from both research and tourist groups so said Linda Mutesi who is the head of communication at  RDB.

On the other hand, a silverback called Getty that belonged to the Karisimbi family broke away with nine other gorillas sometime back to form his own group and according to the experts note, this is not strange because by nature, there is no way a gorilla family can’t have more than one dominant adult male, they can never stay together in harmony that is why this gorilla had to find its way out. This is not new because in 2009, Getty and some other Silverback that heads the Karisimbi family now were both members of the Susa gorilla family which had three adult males then and these two broke off. They are called silver backs because they have silvery hair on their backs.

Now that Getty has formed his own family that is yet to be named, each of these males are heading families of their own. Getty broke away from his Karisimbi family sometime last year but according to those that see it say it is still moving up and down between its two former families meanwhile it tries to establish a stable home, something that is expected to happen in two years time. Officials from RDB however say that they will think about issuing trekking permits for Getty‘s family after it has settles down and it will become the eleventh official family open for tourism.

Officials also said that this year’s Kwita Izina festival is very special because  of the addition of twelve new-born gorillas which means  that Rwanda’s volcanoes are now home to 291 apes thus a huge a achievement given the fact that these were endangered animals before conservation efforts. It is very true that by nature, gorilla mothers give birth to a baby once every four years after a gestation period of 8.5months and it is very unfortunate that about 30% of those newborns don’t survive their first year because of diseases, may be accidents and also many of them are usually killed by male that is in charge of the family especially all the babies of his predecessor, in an effort to secure his own genes in the offspring. The later is a common cause of deaths among baby gorillas.

Africa gorilla news