![]() Mountain gorillas and Grauer’s gorillas, both subspecies of the eastern gorilla, number about a thousand and 3,800 respectively, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Įbola is one more threat among a litany of others that gorillas in the region face. (Read more: Meet the vets risking their lives to treat wild gorillas.) “We don’t know exactly what infection looks like in a wild great ape, because past outbreaks that have affected wild great apes in West Africa have, unfortunately, been described ex post facto, after mortalities have occurred,” says Amy Bond, a spokesperson for Gorilla Doctors, a nonprofit veterinary organization that protects and cares for gorillas in DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. Gorillas can't explain their symptoms, much less quarantine themselves, resulting in a far higher mortality rate. Walsh says the spread of the pathogen within gorilla populations appears to roughly mimic its progression among humans-the major differences being population density and the capacity for medical interventions. Many of the carcasses were discovered later and tested positive for the virus. In another outbreak slightly further south during the same period, 91 of 95 gorillas disappeared. “The impact is very ‘all or none’: Patches with something like 90 to 95 percent mortality can extend over hundreds or even thousands of square kilometers,” says Walsh.ĭuring an outbreak of the Zaire ebolavirus strain in 20 along the Congo-Gabon border, 130 of 143 gorillas that researchers were observing at the time disappeared. While hard data is scarce, the documented toll on gorilla populations has been particularly alarming. Previous outbreaks have devastated populations of non-human primates, a group that includes chimpanzees, monkeys, and gorillas. Vaccine breakthroughs, advances in awareness, and improved containment protocol mean the mortality rate for humans has improved drastically since the first recorded outbreak in 1976: It now sits at around 50 percent. As of November 5, the World Health Organization confirmed 2,185 deaths since the outbreak was declared 15 months ago. ![]() In eastern DRC, the human toll of Ebola continues to mount. (Go inside the fight to save Virunga, one of the world’s most dangerous parks.) Ebola in gorillas More than 170 rangers have been killed in the line of duty in the past 20 years, including one on Thursday, at the hands of armed rebel groups and local militias. Virunga National Park, in eastern DRC, is home to one of the largest populations of remaining mountain gorillas. Protecting the gorillas’ safety is a dangerous undertaking in its own right. “Once Ebola has been identified within a local gorilla population, the consequences have always been really catastrophic,” says Peter Walsh, a primate ecologist who worked on developing an Ebola vaccine for primates at the University of Cambridge. When news came in August 2018 that a case of the deadly virus had been confirmed in the DRC’s North Kivu Province, conservation groups stepped up observation and monitoring efforts of the region’s mountain and Grauer’s gorillas. While the current outbreak of the viral hemorrhagic fever in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hasn’t spilled over to great apes, conservation groups are on high alert. Now mountain gorillas and Grauer’s gorillas may be at risk too. It’s possible that as much as a third of the global Western lowland gorilla population, a critically endangered subspecies, was wiped out by Ebola in the early 2000s, experts say.
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