Gorillas in Danger from Poaching and Ebola

by Sherry Morse

A new study has found that in the last twenty years poaching and the Ebola virus have cut the ape population of western Africa in half, and that apes are in immediate threat of extinction if the dangers cannot be eliminated or reduced.

At the current rate of decline, study co-author Peter Walsh of Princeton University estimates that ape populations will drop eighty percent over the next thirty-three years, if not sooner. Walsh and the study’s other authors would like to see more protected areas for the apes, more work to prevent poaching, and more research into the spread of Ebola. They would also like the World Conservation Union to reclassify gorillas and chimpanzees as "critically endangered" rather than just "endangered".

Russ Mittermeir, chairman of the World Conservation Union’s primate specialist group, said he would support the change as long as it did not undervalue other rarer species of ape like the mountain gorilla.

Poaching accounted for most of the estimated fifty-six percent decrease in ape populations, which include both gorillas and chimpanzees, in Gabon and the Republic of Congo between 1983 and 2000. Ape populations that live in forests closest to the cities are most in danger from hunters looking for bush meat, according to Walsh.

Although the forests of Gabon and the Republic of Congo are still home to tens of thousands of apes, logging has opened up roads that have made it much easier for poachers to hunt apes for food.

Even in forests considered remote, apes have been affected by Ebola, especially in areas around Congo’s Odzala National Park where hundreds of gorillas and chimpanzees have died over the last few months from the virus.

In some areas it is estimated that the ape population has been cut by more than ninety percent due to Ebola.

© 2003 Animal News Center, Inc.