Aug 6, 2008

Good News for Gorillas

I've only posted on gorillas a few times, mainly out of fear of retribution should they ever get on the web. But there is good news to report on the gorilla front. The Wildlife Conservation Society is pleased to report that a population of some 125,000 western lowland gorillas have been discovered in the Republic of Congo. This nearly triples the estimated wild population of lowland gorillas.

So, Snowflake and the rest of us have reason to celebrate. It would seem that conservation efforts by the Congoese government have worked. Of course, the next step is to keep this population safe from poachers and traditional medicine practitioners. As an interesting side note, these gorillas were discovered by hunters, who then led the authorities to the treasure trove.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"efforts by the Congoese government"

I believe that the word is, "Congolese."

Anonymous said...

Poor Snowflake. I watched a nature thing on PBS about him & Koko and a few other gorillas.
Very sad program.
Anyways... I really hope that they will be able to keep those gorillas from coming to harm. I doubt that though. There are just too many greedy stupid people in this world... so we should expect that number to go down.

Anonymous said...

Hopefully not. There are many worldwide conservation efforts to protect all endangered animals and in this day and age, more so because of global warming. Tremendous efforts are being made such as finding and paying rangers, educating people on more medicine choices besides TCMs and being on top of where the poachers hunt.

Some people are good and hopefully we can reverse this damage.

Unknown said...

Lisal,

The saddest thing about Snowflake was that the very thing that made him uniqu -- his albinism, is the very thing that killed him. He died of a metastatic skin cancer, which all albinos are very subect to.