Credit: Zanne Labuschagne/WCS.
Buka, a silverback gorilla in Republic of Congo’s Nouabale-Ndoki National Park. A decade-long study on Western Equatorial Africa’s western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and central chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) has revealed there are more of these animals in the wild than previously thought. Researchers now estimate that there are more than 360,000 western lowland gorillas in the wild, approximately one third higher than earlier figures. However, those same populations are declining by 2.7 percent annually.