The Virunga National Park which is situated in the east of DR Congo has recorded the birth of two new mountain gorillas in the Wilungula and Humba families. Because of the new strategy “extreme conservation”, these numbers continue to increase, the Park authorities said on Thursday.
In a tweet, the PNVi announced that 1 female gorilla took birth in the Humba family, as well as that 1 male gorilla in “the Wilungula family”. These two new arrivals have increased the count of gorilla births to 16, recorded since January”, said the park.
The park has made reports that by mid-2021 its mountain gorilla population will be 350 individuals. From them, 225 are divided into ten groups and are accustomed to the presence of humans. In 1981, their population was just 58 individuals. According to reports or documents, “They were 131 in 2000, 201 in 2010, and 286 during the last census in 2016,” it adds, specifying that the next exhaustive and transboundary census is planned for 2022.
In total, in the three countries (DRC, Uganda, Rwanda), the population has increased fivefold in 40 years. Roughly, from less than 200 individuals in the 1980s to 1,063 individuals has increased according to the census of 2016 and 2018. In November 2018 the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) revised the status of the mountain gorillas. It was critically endangered. This “conservation success” is the result of a strategy called “extreme conservation”, which involves close monitoring on a daily basis, of individuals by guards, trackers, and veterinarians”.
But “such a conservation effort has a significant financial cost” and, as PNVi points out, “the ecological challenges for mountain gorillas remain high, especially in an area with a very high population density, very high poverty rates, and chronic political instability.
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Data source: phys.org