Stephanie Pain, New Scientist 27 Jul 09;
YOU might have missed it, but in December 2008 - when the world's media were preoccupied with President Barack Obama's election and the global economic recession - the United Nations declared 2009 the Year of the Gorilla. If you did notice, you could be forgiven for wondering why. Just weeks earlier it was reported that almost half of all primate species are at risk of extinction, so why lavish yet more attention on the one that is seldom out of the spotlight?
The simple answer is because they need it now more than ever. Despite all the film footage, fieldwork and fund-raising, and the efforts of park rangers and conservation NGOs, the number of gorillas continues to plummet. Hunting, logging, mining and disease are taking a terrible toll on the greatest of the great apes, and if things continue as they are, they may be reduced to nothing more than a series of small, highly vulnerable populations within decades.
That's not the only reason the UN chose to focus on gorillas. These apes are such iconic animals they can galvanise people into action like few others. Redoubling efforts to protect gorillas and their habitats will benefit other endangered primates, including chimps and bonobos. If those efforts centre on development projects and gorilla tourism, they can also improve the lives of some of the world's poorest people. That is the UN's plan. And entirely the wrong one, as far as many gorilla experts are concerned. For all its good intentions, they say, there's no way it can work fast enough to give gorillas any chance of recovery.
"If you try to make saving gorillas a development issue, then you will fail," says Peter Walsh, a leading authority on the abundance and distribution of gorillas. "Any action must focus on protecting the gorillas." Nor is tourism the panacea African governments and potential donors think. "The idea that tourism alone can pay for conservation is a pipe dream," Walsh says. With gorilla numbers falling so fast, it is time to take tough decisions, he argues.
The challenge is daunting. Each of the four subspecies of gorilla is listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List - three of them critically - and each faces its own unique combination of threats and challenges (see map).
For the eastern lowland gorilla, endemic to eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the chief danger is the lawlessness of a region ravaged by successive wars for more than a decade. Waves of people have flooded into the forests and the parks created to protect gorillas. Armies, rebel militias, refugees and gangs of miners have razed forests, eaten gorillas and turned large areas of prime habitat into a moonscape.
Unfortunately for the gorillas, they occupy a region rich in tin, diamonds, gold and coltan - a rare mineral from which tantalum is extracted to make capacitors for cellphones, games consoles and laptops. One of the world's largest deposits of coltan ore is in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the eastern lowland gorilla's most important stronghold. In 2001, when the price of coltan rocketed, 10,000 miners invaded the park illegally.
The last survey was carried out in 1994 and 1995, when there was an estimated 16,900 gorillas. "Since then they have been hammered as food," says Liz Williamson of the IUCN's Primate Specialist Group. No one knows how many remain but Walsh and others fear numbers may have fallen by two-thirds. "It has been so bad for so long in DRC that there are few good survey data. We know about pockets but large areas are no-go zones," he says.
Things look little better for the western lowland gorilla. With a range that stretches across the rainforests of western equatorial Africa, it has always been the most numerous subspecies. Yet its decline in recent years has been shocking. Present estimates suggest around 150,000 gorillas remain, but some models indicate 55 to 75 per cent of the population will go in the next 20 years if things continue as they are. "Unless drastic action is taken, more than 80 per cent of western lowland gorillas will have gone in just three gorilla generations," says Fiona Maisels, surveys and monitoring adviser for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in central Africa. The causes? Commercial hunting and the Ebola virus.
Since the 1990s this part of Africa has seen a huge expansion in mechanised logging. The loss of forest isn't the main worry: there are still vast areas of intact rainforest suitable for gorillas. The danger comes from the logging roads that have opened up remote regions to well-armed hunters with good transport and large order books. An estimated 1 million tonnes of bushmeat is taken each year from these forests, a haul that includes chimps, gorillas, elephants and other rare species. Some bushmeat is sold to migrant workers in logging and mining camps, but far more is destined for towns and cities, where "traditional food" is increasingly popular. "This is not subsistence hunting, it's highly organised commercial hunting operated by criminal cartels," says Walsh.
In a cruel twist, the gorillas that remain beyond the reach of commercial hunters have been hardest hit by Ebola. In humans, Ebola has a mortality rate of 80 per cent - but in gorillas the figure is at least 95 per cent (Science, vol 314, p 1564). A series of epidemics since the early 1990s has caused massive die-offs in Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, the gorilla's main strongholds. It is hard to find the corpses and impossible to count them. "What we do know is that some areas that had many gorillas now have virtually none," says Walsh. In parks where the number of gorillas was known, around half have died.
Most endangered
The other subspecies of western gorilla, the reclusive Cross river gorilla, is Africa's most endangered ape. There are no more than 300 occupying the rugged hills around the headwaters of the Cross river, astride the border of Cameroon and Nigeria. They were probably never very numerous, but genetic studies point to a population crash within the past 200 years, probably from an upsurge in hunting as guns became more widely available. Although hunting continues, the biggest danger today is further loss of habitat, particularly in the forested corridors that link hill areas where the gorillas are concentrated. "Much of their habitat isn't protected," says John Oates, who has spent more than 40 years studying primates in Africa. "And even where it is, it continues to shrink, in part because there are human settlements inside parks and reserves, and these are expanding."
Amid the gloom, there is one bright spot that offers some grounds for optimism. Mountain gorillas, a subspecies of eastern gorilla, survive in two places. In Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, the population seems to have been stable at around 300 for some time. In the Virunga mountains - an area of volcanic highlands spanning the borders of Rwanda, DRC and Uganda - numbers have risen from an all-time low of 250 in the 1970s to an estimated 380 gorillas today, and models suggest that barring catastrophe they are viable for the next century. This remarkable recovery is testament to decades of "active" conservation, which began with the arrival of Dian Fossey in 1967 and has continued through the efforts of conservation groups, biologists and park staff who have risked their lives to protect gorillas. In 1979, American conservationists Amy Vedder and Bill Weber set up the Mountain Gorilla Project, combining anti-poaching activities with education and a pioneering tourism scheme that was soon bringing in much needed foreign currency. With gorillas now a valued resource, the government increased support for conservation. By 1989 gorilla tourism was Rwanda's third biggest earner of foreign currency.
Then catastrophe struck. In 1991 the region was plunged into war, genocide and civil unrest that lasted a decade. Rebel militias and refugees flooded into the parks and some stayed, felling trees, growing crops and eating game. Tourism stopped, researchers were forced to leave and anti-poaching patrols were suspended. Astonishingly, the gorilla population continued to grow, albeit slowly. "Even during the conflicts the warring factions have been committed to protecting gorillas," says Williamson. Tourists began returning to Rwanda in 2000, and by 2006 gorilla tourism was the country's top earner of foreign currency. Today, the three governments that share the Virunga mountains operate a cross-border conservation programme, with rangers and anti-poaching patrols from each country working together.
The Virunga story is heartening, but mountain gorillas remain at risk. One of the greatest threats they face is from the very people who protect them: tourists, park staff and gorilla researchers can all too easily transmit human diseases that can be lethal to apes. Lack of security is also a constant worry. In 2007, at least eight gorillas were shot dead in DRC's Virunga National Park, apparently as a warning to park staff trying to stop illegal charcoal production. There's pressure on habitat too: mountain gorillas are hemmed in by fast-growing human populations hungry for land. Confined to parks, they are at risk from inbreeding. There are reports of incest and evidence of genetic abnormalities among Virunga gorillas. "Some have webbed feet or are cross-eyed but these aren't life-threatening conditions. There are far bigger threats to address before we start worrying about the shrinking gene pool," says Williamson.
Clearly, the UN had good reason to designate 2009 the Year of the Gorilla. So why is its strategy proving so controversial? Ultimately, it's all about attention and money: many conservationists fear that both will be diverted towards the sort of projects the UN is promoting at the expense of more urgently needed action that will bring speedier results. The UN - working through its environment arm UNEP and the Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) - advocates projects that reduce people's reliance on forests for food and fuel or which give subsistence hunters alternative livelihoods. It is also pushing tourism, widely seen as a means of creating jobs that give local people reason to protect gorillas and generate enough profit to ensure governments back their conservation.
No one denies the need to improve standards of living and to get local people behind conservation efforts (See "Changing attitudes") but the UN's strategy cannot bring change fast enough, argues Walsh. "Rural poverty is too intractable a problem to solve in time to stop the dramatic decline in gorilla numbers. Development can even add to the gorillas' woes. "Almost any development next to a protected area is likely to attract more people and lead to more destructive activities," says Oates. Worse, as Walsh points out, raising living standards locally will do nothing to stamp out commercial hunting. "Those operations are run by outsiders with little to gain from local development."
As for tourism, expectations are way too high. The success of tourism in the Virungas has raised hopes that gorillas elsewhere can generate enough money to fund conservation and supply a cash bonanza for the governments of gorilla countries. "But it's absolutely not possible to generate the same level of income elsewhere," Williamson says.
The Virunga gorillas are confined to a relatively small area with fairly open habitat, they don't move around much and are used to people after 30 years of tourism. In western equatorial Africa, by contrast, gorillas live in dense forest where they are hard to find and near impossible to follow. More importantly, mountain gorillas have never been hunted for meat. "People have eaten practically all the other large animals but in Rwanda it's traditionally taboo to eat primates," says Williamson. That makes it easier to get close. Gorillas elsewhere have always been hunted and are terrified of people. "Where gorillas have been hunted it can take 10 years to habituate them," Williamson says.
Tourism would also be far harder to regulate in central and western Africa, increasing the risk of transmitting potentially fatal human diseases to gorillas. There are strict rules about how close tourists can approach mountain gorillas, but a recent study in Bwindi found almost daily infringements even there (Oryx, vol 40, p 428). "If you introduce disease to some of the smaller subpopulations of gorillas you could wipe out the entire population," says Oates.
The main flaw in the tourism plan, however, is that it fails to take into account the scale of illegal commercial hunting. "If gorilla hunting in western equatorial Africa is not controlled soon, tourism investment will be moot: there will be few gorillas left for tourists to see," says Walsh.
Ian Redmond, chief consultant for GRASP and the UN's ambassador for the Year of the Gorilla, understands why many of his fellow conservationists might be frustrated by the UN's approach. The main purpose of the Year of the Gorilla is to push the apes higher up people's list of priorities, he says. "Diplomacy is central to our campaign. We have to get governments to recognise the many values of gorillas and the forests they live in and help build their capacity to protect them." To that end, last month in Germany the UN brought together government ministers, gorilla experts, prospective donors and conservationists from 20 countries. The result was the Frankfurt Declaration, a statement outlining the threats facing gorillas and urging more effort to reduce them. "The declaration is an important statement of common purpose and good intent," says Redmond. "Getting governments together to sign bits of paper can seem a quite expensive activity and progress can seem slow, but if we don't change the bigger picture then in the long term our efforts are doomed to failure."
Tough decisions
Many conservationists argue that there won't be a long term for gorillas if urgent action is not taken now. So what's the answer? "As in any accident and emergency department we have to do triage - identify the problem, set clear goals and focus on those," says Walsh.
That can mean taking tough decisions. For instance, there is little anyone can do for eastern lowland gorillas until some semblance of stability returns to the region. "Their situation is appalling. In most of their range, there's no security and no one can protect them," says Williamson. There's more scope to help Cross river gorillas, which live in 10 small subpopulations linked by forested corridors. Rich Bergl of North Carolina Zoo, who studied the genetics of these gorillas, found that some travel along these corridors to breed in other groups. As long as these links remain, he is optimistic about the gorilla's prospects. "If hunting stops and the habitat is maintained the population could expand." Remote sensing and ground surveys have been used to identify the corridors, and "gorilla guardians" are being recruited from nearby villages to report any hunting, monitor gorilla movements and raise awareness locally.
The greatest benefit to the largest number of gorillas, however, would come from focusing on two top priorities: putting an end to hunting, which kills thousands of gorillas every year, and preventing outbreaks of Ebola.
For Ebola, at least, there is a plan. So far, the disease has killed only western lowland gorillas, but in 2007 a new strain of the virus, the Bundibugyo strain, emerged in Uganda and has come within 150 kilometres of Bwindi and 200 kilometres of the Virungas. "It's definitely around," says Walsh, a key player in VaccinApe, a consortium that includes the WWF and several vaccine laboratories. Vaccines against Ebola are in development and likely to be available within two years. Safety tests are about to start and next year should see pilot studies of how to deliver the vaccine in the wild. "Ultimately, the plan is to use a darted vaccine on habituated apes, then vaccinate larger numbers of apes with an oral vaccine once technical and safety issues are resolved," says Walsh.
Putting a stop to poaching is proving to be a more obstinate problem. Gorillas are protected by law in all 10 gorilla countries yet hunting remains big business and bushmeat is sold openly even in major towns. At a meeting in Congo in 2005, all agreed that hunting was the biggest threat to western lowland gorillas and that the way to deal with it was with more anti-poaching patrols and better enforcement of existing laws. "We know that works. Unfortunately, there has been no increase in funding for law enforcement," Walsh says.
Last year, the UN brokered an agreement in which the governments of the gorilla countries made a commitment to assess how well their laws are being enforced. That sounds like progress, but it has left field staff and researchers frustrated by yet more procrastination. "I absolutely agree that dealing with hunting is a top priority," says Redmond. "We can highlight the need for more law enforcement but we can't enforce it: that's the responsibility of the governments." Walsh, however, argues that action is now more important than diplomacy. "Half the funds for gorilla conservation should be immediately redirected towards massive law enforcement campaigns."
Walsh also believes there must be a new model for protecting and managing parks. Rather than national and international-level programmes, with centrally managed networks of parks competing for a share of inadequate funds, he advocates local initiatives. "We know that top-down management doesn't work in Africa. What works are local initiatives, with programmes tailored to local conditions and run by people dedicated to one place and its gorillas," he says. Rather than fighting for funds, each park should be financed by its own trust fund. Williamson agrees: "With a trust fund, the funding comes without strings."
It doesn't need that much money, says Williamson. Walsh has done a back-of-an-envelope calculation. "If you have 30 parks - plenty to save the gorillas - and a fund of $30 million per park, that's $1 billion altogether: to save gorillas forever." Measured against the cost of recent bank bailouts and bankers' bonuses, it really doesn't sound much. "At the moment there is still hope," says Walsh. "But without a change in the way things are done, gorillas may be reduced to small, Virunga-like populations within 10 or 20 years."
Read more: What you can do to help gorillas
Plus: Changing attitudes to gorillas
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