Jojo the gorilla spent his life alone. Can he finally find a companion?

In 2015, an 11-year-old male gorilla named Jojo stepped onto grass for the first time. Until then he had lived almost entirely in a tiny cage at a private zoo in Gabon, where he ended up after being taken from the wild as an infant. The poachers who captured him had killed his family.

More than ten years later, Jojo lives in a sanctuary run by the Lekedi Foundation in Gabon. He is still alone. He has had no family since the day he was taken, and no gorilla companions of any kind. His carers want to change that, perhaps by bringing in another rescued or zoo-bred gorilla he could live with and bond with. Doing so is proving far from simple.

Prof Gillian Forrester of the University of Sussex is studying Jojo as part of research into great ape psychology and how rescued animals recover from trauma. She calls him probably the most extreme case of isolation she has seen in a great ape. He was less than a year old, clinging to his mother, when he was captured and sold. Most gorillas spend their first 14 to 19 years embedded in a family unit. Jojo was kept entirely alone, on public display at the zoo that bought him.

His keepers see the effects daily. Maxe Anaclet Makaba, Lekedi's head keeper, sees him nearly every day and says Jojo craves human interaction. Jojo gathers leaves for keepers to hold so that they can trade them for a treat. Éric Willaume, who runs the sanctuary, says Jojo calls out when women he knows well visit his enclosure and then leave, using sounds that wild silverback males make to summon females. "He definitely feels lonely," Willaume says.

Forrester has used a thermal camera to film Jojo's face and track blood flow, an approach she describes as game-changing for studying anxiety and trauma in apes. It shows what appears to be a chronically cold nose. When a primate is stressed, blood flows toward the eyes and ears, putting it on alert, and the nose temporarily cools. In Jojo, this "nasal dip" does not seem to recover, which she reads as a malfunctioning stress response and a sign of harmful, chronic stress.

Jojo's case sits within a wider trade. The Pan African Sanctuary Alliance says more than 6,000 African primates were estimated to have been bought or sold in the global trade in apes and other primates between 2000 and 2023, with thousands more trafficked illegally as pets, wild meat and traditional medicine. Conservationist Tony King of the UK's Aspinall Foundation, who specialises in rehabilitating rescued apes, says young apes old enough to grasp that their family was killed can lose the will to live. He recalls two infant sister gorillas rescued and brought to a sanctuary in the Congo Basin, who stayed clinging in a tight ball for about three days. He believes that kept them alive. The Grace Center puts rescued youngsters with a group as soon as possible so they can learn to be gorillas.

For a fully mature animal like Jojo, who is probably in his 20s, the path is harder. Forrester says a companion would be deeply healing, and the Grace Center's Dr Katie Fawcett says forming social relationships is essential before an animal can be considered for release, the keepers' ultimate goal. But the rules for moving captive gorillas across borders are designed for breeding programmes, not for finding companions or reintroductions. A transfer from an accredited zoo would be decided by an international committee weighing genetics, health and compatibility. Forrester has approached several accredited zoos, but the talks have fizzled out with no sign of progress.

There is also doubt about whether it would work. King thinks it may be too late for Jojo to bond with other gorillas and that he is probably best where he is, since an introduction could add stress. Dr Robin Morrison of the University of Zurich notes that about a third of adult males live solitary for a good part of their lives, though she suspects Jojo is both traumatised and lonely. Any introduction would be slow, perhaps beginning with an object carrying the other animal's scent. Makaba, for his part, says being alone is like being in prison. For now, the question of whether Jojo gets a companion rests on a transfer process that does not yet exist.