THE Ebola virus has killed a third of the world’s lowland gorillas in the past decade, and the epidemic seems to be widening. Bats have previously been blamed for spreading the disease, but now Damien Caillaud and colleagues at the University of Rennes in France think gorillas are catching Ebola from each other too.
The team watched 377 gorillas in Odzala National Park in the Republic of Congo since 2001 and charted when each individual died. “Maybe 30 are left now,” Caillaud says.
The death rate fits an epidemic model in which gorillas living in groups catch it from other…
