The population of Africa’s eastern lowland gorilla has slumped by more than 70% in the past decade, from 17 000 animals in 1994 to fewer than 5 000 today, a conservation group said on Tuesday.
Virtually all of the world’s population of this highly endangered species lives in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a region ravaged by years of war, over-hunting, mining and pressure from increasing human populations.
”The staggering and almost immediate disappearance of the eastern lowland gorilla underscores the alarming decline of an entire ecosystem,” the Washington-based group Conservation International said in a press statement.
Other species in the region, including the chimpanzee, forest elephant, Nile crocodile, Congo peacock, Congo bay owl, okapi and leopard ”are also experiencing severe declines”, it added.
Conservation International said it had pledged a three-year multimillion-dollar grant to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International to help beef up protection in more than three million hectares of gorilla habitat, a region known as the Maiko Tayna Kahuzi-Biega Landscape.
This has been a protected zone since 1938, but habitat loss and poaching have long made it only a ”paper park”, Conservation International said.
Gorillas, the largest animal primates, are an endangered species.
In January, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Rwandan conservationists announced that one of the rarest of these species, the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Highlands of Central Africa, had seen a surprising upturn in numbers.
There are 380 of these gorillas today, a 17% rise since the last extensive estimate, carried out in 1989, they said.
The gorillas’ home straddles Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC. — Sapa-AFP