For the past three years, a small pocket of east-central Africa, encompassing Rwanda and eastern Zaire, has been the site of violence and chaos. The 1994 genocidal war in Rwanda culminated in an exodus of over a million refugees, fleeing into Zaire, where hundreds of thousands lived in squalid refugee camps until the end of last year. Then, in a sudden mass movement, they returned to Rwanda with the eruption of a civil war in Zaire whose end we have yet to witness.
This region of Africa is also the site of a 150 square miles of high altitude mountain forest - the Virunga Volcanoes- that is one of two remaining refuges for the mountain gorilla. My career as a primatologist is based on studying the gorillas of the Virunga Volcanoes, and people often ask me what has become of the animals. I thought I'd use this column to fill you in on the state of gorillas here and in other parts of Africa, the only continent where they are found.
Considering that their forest habitat has been a hot-spot of military activity, studded with land mines, the 120 or so gorillas in Rwanda have fared amazingly well throughout the violence. In fact, there has been a baby-boom, and the population has grown slightly. Only one gorilla that we know of was a direct casualty of the fighting, literally caught in the crossfire.
Just across the border in Zaire, the mountain gorillas have not been as lucky. The refugee camps sprawled along the edge of the national park needed firewood and building material and the people took it from the forest. In 1995, several animals were killed by poachers. Nevertheless, the mountain gorillas in Zaire have held their own, at least until recently. At present, no one knows exactly what is happening in the forests of eastern Zaire.
One reason that the mountain gorillas have survived the crises in their world is that they have been protected. Ever since Dian Fossey established her research camp in 1967 in Rwanda, the Virunga Volcano region has been a focus for intense research and conservation activity. The park rangers in both Rwanda and Zaire and the field staff of the research center have patrolled the forest and monitored the gorilla groups throughout the violence, often risking their lives.
People tend to think that mountain "gorillas in the mist" , are the only gorillas in the world. In fact, there are many thousands of lowland gorillas in other parts of Africa. Over the last 20 years, scientists have conducted laborious surveys through vast tracts of tropical forest in attempts to estimate their numbers.
Professor Sandy Harcourt of the Anthropology Department at UC Davis, who has spent many years studying wild gorillas, recently calculated gorilla numbers in all eight African countries where they exist. His figures are based on densities (number of gorillas per square kilometer) found in the surveys, and published estimates for amount of forest remaining in Africa. The results look optimistic. In several countries, there turn out to be more gorillas than was previously thought. The biggest changes were in Cameroon and especially Congo where vast areas of open swampy forest, previously thought unsuitable for gorillas, turn out to hold high concentrations of the apes.
Whereas the last published estimates in 1988 came to around 55,000 gorillas in the world, Sandy Harcourt calculates 123,000. Gabon and Congo harbor by far the greatest number, each with over 43,000. That's the good news. The bad news is two-fold. First, 123,000 might sound like a lot until you realize that they could all fit into two Candlestick Parks and still leave many thousands of seats spare. Secondly, gorillas in all countries face serious threats.
Loss of habitat to commercial logging and human settlement, along with intense hunting for food, especially in central Africa with its booming "bushmeat" trade, have led Harcourt to conclude that within the next 150 years gorilla numbers will crash until the animals exist only within protected reserves.
To end back on a positive note, there are extensive research and conservation programs in all regions where high numbers of gorillas have been found, and over the last decade several countries have created national parks for their protection. We can only hope that this will be enough to preserve one our closest living relatives on earth.
Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616
e-mail: kjstewart@ucdavis.edu