Gaining the Trust of the Gorillas | Dian Fossey: Secrets in the Mist

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

KELLY STEWART: Dian Fossey was definitely a pioneer. I do not think that word has been overused. Before that, nobody had done a long-term study of gorillas. Nobody had studied them month after month and year after year.

IAN REDMOND: She wanted to be the scientist who began the first long-term field study of gorilla behavior in their society, and to take that as far as it would go.

NARRATOR: (READING FOSSEY'S JOURNAL) I've been following one guerrilla group round all month, and I'm now able to get within 30 to 60 feet of them. To be perfectly frank, I think they're quite confused as to my species.

IAN REDMOND: In order to study them and learn about the behavior, Dian had to get them used to her. And that process is called habituation, winning the trust. The habituation process is not nice, because you're upsetting this family of gorillas day after day after day. Dian's methods played on the gorillas' curiosity. So she would behave in ways that would elicit a curious rather than anger response. Like when she was climbing a tree to get a better look, she would deliberately ham it up. And she found that that got their attention.

NARRATOR: (READING FOSSEY'S JOURNAL) I've gotten them accustomed to me by aping them, and they are fascinated by my facial grimaces and other actions that I wouldn't be caught dead doing in front of anyone. I feel like a complete fool, but this technique seems to be working.

Naming ions and ionic compounds | Atoms, compounds, and ions | Chemistry | Khan Academy

FIRST Photo on the INTERNET ... and other things too.

View All

Subtracting rational expressions: factored denominators | High School Math | Khan Academy

Pause this video and see if you can subtract this magenta rational expression from this yellow one. All right, now let’s do this together. The first thing that jumps out at you is that you realize that these don’t have the same denominator, and you would …

The Banach–Tarski Paradox

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. There’s a famous way to seemingly create chocolate out of nothing. Maybe you’ve seen it before. This chocolate bar is 4 squares by 8 squares, but if you cut it like this and then like this and finally like this, you can rearrang…

The History and Future of Everything -- Time

Time makes sense in small pieces. But when you look at huge stretches of time, it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around things. So let’s start small—with minutes, hours, days. You probably spent the last 24 hours mostly sleeping and working, with s…

Building a Cabin in the Arctic | Life Below Zero

What doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger. Good practice. Get knocked down, get right back up again, and get back to work. [Music] Just got the dogs out for a good run. I’m about to start working on my cabin. It’s kind of been getting put off a long…

Threats to the U.S system and what we need to do

Would you agree with this? We have the greatest system of government ever since the beginning of time. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights have a lot of safeguards built in. As Churchill said, when it comes down to it, we try everything else, but we e…

Why Don't We Shoot Nuclear Waste Into Space?

Here in the Kotart Labs, we test very important ideas to see what happens when you blow things up or play with black holes. Many of you suggested that we look into an idea that sounds reasonable: shooting nuclear waste into space. It’s one of those concep…

Gaining the Trust of the Gorillas | Dian Fossey: Secrets in the Mist

More Articles