January 31, 2012

Silverback Inshuti Faces Another Lone Silverback

Silverback Inshuti is not getting much of a break from lone silverbacks! Today he interacted with lone silverback Tuyizere. This lone silverback followed the group forcing Inshuti to travel a long distance. Inshuti charged him twice to prevent him from going any closer to the females in the group. Fortunately, the dominant silverback appeared to have recovered enough from last week’s attack to deal with the intruder.

Inshuti seems to be slowly recovering from injuries inflicted by two lone silverbacks on Friday (a large wound on his head is still open but dry).

On Friday, we were not able to identify the two lone silverbacks but on Saturday trackers got a closer look and identified one of them as lone silverback Turatsinze. So we can probably assume Tuyizere was with him on Friday and together they attacked Inshuti. This makes sense considering that we also saw these two males together in November, during an interaction with Titus’s group.

Tuyizere’s advances led the group to travel over 600 meters today in an effort to escape. The lone silverback persisted for 4.5 hours until, at 1:30 p.m., he gave up his chase. Although there were no actual displays observed during the interaction, Inshuti did charge Tuyizere twice, sending the loner retreating back into the vegetation. Tuyizere was 100 meters away from the group when the observation period came to a close.

Veronica Vecellio and Jessica Burbridge, Karisoke Research Center