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Lowland Gorillas inhabit a vanishing landscape, a jungle in Central Africa so dense and remote, and so free from traces of human life, that a surveyor nicknamed it "The Green Abyss." After a two-year survey of the area, the Wildlife Conservation Society has brought back some rare good news from the front lines of the battle to save threatened species, with encouraging data about the Gorilla population. Society head Steve Sanderson told Focus Earth "The message is that conservation works, and if we do it better, it will work better."
The Lowland Gorilla has been under attack from a variety of forces in recent years. These creatures' habitat is disappearing as forests are cleared for timber, their health is threatened by the Ebola virus, which proves just as deadly to the apes as it is to humans, and they're under constant assault from hunters, who see the animals as a food source. In 1997, when conservationist Michael Fay explained that Gorilla meat is seen as "a delicacy" in the rampant poverty of the Congo, all these devastating forces had combined to reduce the Lowland Gorilla population to levels that scientists estimated as low as 50,000 animals.
The new survey from the WCS, put out this week, offered Focus Earth?s Ned Potter some pleasantly surprising data to report. In the areas of the Abyss that are basically inaccessible to human beings, the Gorillas are thriving in large colonies. In fact, the number of Lowland Gorillas living there is double what scientists expected to find.
However, these great apes haven't completely won the war for survival. The Republic of Congo has officially declared much of the Gorillas' habitat as a nature preserve, but the cost of policing the area?s borders remains prohibitively high, potentially leaving the animals exposed.
For more about the survey, the African gorilla population, and conservation work in the Congo, visit the Wildlife Conservation Society's story
