Gorillas Gone Wild
Great news this morning on National Public Radio:
Gorilla experts with the Wildlife Conservation Society say they've made a spectacular find in isolated forests of the Republic of Congo: a large group of previously undiscovered western lowland gorillas. The animals are critically endangered.
Researchers say the first wildlife census of the area has revealed that 125,000 western lowland gorillas are now thriving in the country's northern forests, a number that is twice some estimates for the worldwide population.
"We have found the mother lode of western lowland gorillas," said Steven Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which led the research. "We had no idea that these great densities, that is numbers per square kilometer [of the gorillas], were possible in central Congo."
The discovery comes even as other gorillas living in central Africa are being pushed toward extinction.
A family of western lowland gorillas and a sitatunga share a feeding patch.
Why are gorillas so endangered? Here's the beginning of one analysis from Aaron Scott:
Unlike mountain gorillas, which number in the hundreds, the western lowland gorilla population is still large enough and inaccessible enough that conservationists do not know its size with any real accuracy.
What conservationists do know is that ape populations are plummeting, decimated by the combined effects of the Ebola virus, commercial hunting and deforestation. The gorillas' ability to recover remains in question, despite recent research led by the Wildlife Conservation Society.
"Ebola has resulted in dramatic local declines in gorilla populations in Congo and Gabon in the last two decades, with population crashes of more than 95 percent being recorded," said Emma Stokes, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society.
"Given the long life spans and slow reproductive cycles of great apes, recent estimates suggest it may take up to 120 years to recover from population crashes of this magnitude," Stokes said.
Read more at the bottom of this page.
CRN works at researching the context in which molecular manufacturing may be developed, drivers that might hasten or slow its emergence, and factors that could make the technology either safer or more dangerous. As we do so, we try to keep one eye open for "wild cards" that might take us by surprise.
Will worries about animal extinction play such a role? Probably not, but the world keeps changing and we need to stay abreast of the latest ideas and discoveries in many areas.
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