Critically Endangered
Eastern gorilla
Gorilla beringei
Eastern gorilla is a primate in the family Hominidae (order Primates) — Gorilla beringei, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The face, hands, feet and breast are bald. The fur is mainly black, but adult males have a silvery "saddle" on their back. When the gorilla gets older, the hair on the saddle of the back becomes white, much like the gray hair of elderly people.
The heaviest gorilla recorded was a 1.83-metre (6.0 ft) silverback shot in Ambam, Cameroon, that weighed 267 kilograms (589 lb), although the latter area is within the range of the western gorilla, far outside that of the eastern gorilla.
A full-grown male eastern gorilla typically weighs 140–205.5 kg (309–453 lb) and stands 1.7 m (5.6 ft) upright and a female typically weighs 90–100 kg (200–220 lb) and stands 1.5 m (4.9 ft) tall.
Range and habitat
Mountain gorillas are restricted to the mountain rainforest and subalpine forest of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), southwestern Uganda and Rwanda. Grauer's gorilla occur across the forests of the Albertine Rift in eastern DRC. Eastern gorillas are herbivorous, with a heavily foliage based diet, due to lack of available fruit in their habitats.
Small groups consisting of animals confiscated from poachers are kept in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Grauer's gorillas at the Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education (GRACE) center in Tayna Nature Reserve, and mountain gorillas at the Senkwekwe Center in Virunga National Park.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
There is no distinct breeding season and females give birth only once every 3–4 years due to the long period of parental care and a gestation period of 8.5 months.
In crisis
Illegal hunting threatens the species. The eastern gorilla has become increasingly endangered since the 1990s, and the species was listed as critically endangered in September 2016 as its population continued to decrease. Primary threats to the eastern gorilla include habitat destruction for residential, commercial, and agricultural purposes, habitat fragmentation caused by transportation corridors and resource extraction, as well as disease.
Between 1996 and 2016, the eastern gorilla lost more than 70 percent of its population, and by 2016 the total population was estimated to be less than 6,000. While ecotourism can benefit gorilla populations by generating revenue for conservation efforts, there is concern that increased exposure to humans will place gorillas at greater risk of contracting zoonotic diseases.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Eastern gorilla is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Eastern gorilla, Wikidata item Q307157. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
