01 Follow fruit
Western groups track a forest that is not a Virunga meadow.
Operating a gorilla life is a loop: sense, decide, act, and stay inside an energy and legal envelope.
Steps are type-level -- hunt, migrate or spawn -- not a promise that every individual follows the same film sequence.
Principles
Energy in, work out
All-day herbivory -- fruit in western forests, more pith in some mountain diets. A CR ape is a slow calorie machine, not a hunter.
Information before motion
Close social vision and smell. Intelligence here is ranked highest among the 24 for ape social learning -- still below a marketing superlative.
Replacement rate
Slow breeders (whales, apes, albatrosses, tigers) cannot outrun a short political cycle. Fast clutch species still fail if the nest site vanishes.
Place is part of the phenotype
A gorilla without its lake, ice, anemone or gravel is a different, usually failing, animal.
Human systems are now habitat
Quotas, feeders, reserves and films rewrite survival as much as weather. Ebola, bushmeat and logging. A mountain rebound is a different species. Lowest resilience in the atlas is a CR statement.
Diagrams
Gorilla forage / hunt loop
Tracksense
Stalkmove
Killact
Guardhandle
Raiseinvest
Disperseleave
Gorilla life-cycle loop
Birthstart
Weangrow
Learnmove
Disperselearn
Breedbreed
Senescenceend
Life-cycle steps
02 Build a night nest
A new platform, not a den reused for years.
03 Silverback pace
A male holds a group; takeovers rewrite infanticide risk.
04 Wean slowly
Years of dependence -- the CR math.
05 Meet a snare or a virus
The two modern ceilings.
06 Avoid the biopic
Field hours at a bai do not look like Sigourney Weaver.
Hard limits
Physiological envelope
Ebola, bushmeat and logging. A mountain rebound is a different species. Lowest resilience in the atlas is a CR statement.
Place dependence
Without the breeding site or forage pulse, brochure behaviour is theoretical.
Human and legal limits
Quotas, listings and trade rules now bound real populations as tightly as weather.
Keep exploring
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