Good news for Mountain Gorillas! But there's still work to do before they're out of the extinction woods

The latest update of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has provided hope for the conservation of the Mountain Gorilla, which has moved from Critically Endangered to Endangered.

In a forest of lush green vegetation, you wouldn’t have thought that a human would look like a suitable and comfortable seat would you? And yet, that was exactly what one young mountain gorilla decided Sir David Attenborough looked like during filming for his Life on Earth series. This scene is one of Attenborough’s most iconic and showed the soft and playful nature of these huge primates.

A young mountain gorilla testing the comfiness of Sir David Attenborough during filming for Life on Earth

But these gentle giants haven’t had things easy on the conservation front. The last IUCN assessment of the mountain gorilla carried out in 2008 estimated that only roughly 680 individuals survived. This report placed the species in the ‘Critically Endangered’ category, meaning it was facing an ‘extremely high risk of extinction in the wild’.

Fast forward ten years and the 2018 assessment is slightly more cheery. The population has increased by roughly 50% from 680 to over 1000 individuals, enabled by committed conservation efforts including anti-poaching patrols and in-situ veterinary interventions. This increase means the species has been reclassified as Endangered

This clearly doesn’t represent the end of the line for mountain gorilla conservation. The Endangered category means the species is at ‘a high risk of extinction in the wild’. So, yes, this is an improvement from Critically Endangered but mountain gorillas are still a very long way from being out of the extinction woods.

Adult and young mountain gorilla, image source IUCN

Continuing threats include poaching, habitat degradation and introduced human pathogens, including respiratory viruses and the Ebola virus. Mountain gorillas inhabit two protected areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda – Virunga Massif and Bwindi-Sarambwe. In total these areas cover roughly 792 km2, so continued protection of these small areas of forest will be vital for a continued increase in this species.

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