The worst part of sampling a dead gorilla for Ebola, said Dr. William B. Karesh, is the flies.

“You can imagine the sense of panic,” he said. “A hundred thousand ants and carrion flies are coming off the carcass or climbing up your arms. They get inside your hood and are crawling on your face or biting you.

“After half an hour, you have to get out and pull off the hood, clean up and disinfect. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

The task described by Dr. Karesh — a former chief field veterinarian at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs New York’s zoos — was part of an unusual research project. Scientists were trying to predict human Ebola outbreaks by detecting them first in apes and other forest animals.

The team recently published a study in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B detailing 12 years of this work in the Republic of Congo.