Gorillas' Safety Vital to Africa's Tourism Market

Aug. 8, 2007 — -- The gorillas of Central Africa have a lot in common with the people who live among them: their future tenuous, their fate so often determined by a line on a map.

These extraordinary creatures live in the Virunga Mountains, part of a region that has seen more killing than any other place on the planet over the last two decades. Their home is a border region that spans more than 50 miles between Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Rwanda and Uganda the gorillas are well protected and reproducing steadily. Governments there, with the help of wildlife organizations, pay and train jungle guards to protect the animals and that has brought back a booming tourism market.

But on the other side of the mountain range, in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park, mountain gorillas are a dying breed with little protection from officials focused on establishing a functioning government after more than a decade of civil war.

With minimal funding and few guards to keep watch over the species, the DRC's mountain gorilla population is decreasing rapidly, making extinction inevitable if the trend continues, say conservationists. According to the World Wildlife Fund, approximately 700 mountain gorillas live in the wild, approximately 150 of whom reside in the DRC.

July 22, four mountain gorillas — one male silverback and three females — were shot dead in the DRC. A fifth gorilla is still missing and a 5-month-old baby gorilla named Ndeze is now an orphan.

This killing alone reduced the mountain gorilla population in the Virunga Mountains by 1.6 percent, including the loss of five females, considered by preservationists as especially valuable because of their ability to reproduce, according to Conservation International, an organization dedicated to animal protection.

"This is the worst single incident in 30 years," said Russell A. Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, in a written statement to ABC News. "If we can't stop these attacks, our closest living relatives will disappear from the planet."