Needlenose

Checkout this disheartening news regarding the scale of the consumption of gorillas in the bushmeat trade. The article is based on a survey of a particular market and the local area from whence the gorillas are killed.  In that area things are pretty grim:

“According to interviews and field surveys, we think we may have about 200 gorillas left in the area,” says Mr Fidenci.

“But we estimate that 4% of the population is being killed each month, or 50% in a year. It is a lot.”

They figure beyond this one area, there are ~100K Western Lowland gorillas total in a wild, and they’ll be extinct within the decade given the bushmeat trade.

I don’t know if we’d have done a better job killing them off if we actually planned their extermination.

It’s really depressing to consider that we are causing, and concurrently watching, the greatest species extinction since the end of the dinosaurs. Ever since I was a kid, watching Jacques Cousteau or Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, I’ve been watching wilderness disappear – and with it, all the species I was so fascinated with as a child. I guess the planet is slowly boiling to death, so like the proverbial frog in the pot, we don’t know enough to jump out. A few news bits to similarly depress you:

• 700 North American fish species risk extinction (Approximately 39% of described fish species of the continent are imperiled. )
• Will Central Africa’s Forest Wildlife Be Eaten into Extinction? (oh come on, do they really have to ask? We know they’ll all be just pictures in a book for our grandkids)
• Study: bird species will die off faster (More than 1,000 in danger of becoming extinct by 2100)
• Amphibian extinction may be worse than thought (one-third of the world’s 5,918 known amphibian species are classified as threatened with extinction and more than 170 species have likely gone extinct since 1980.)

“Many scientists, including Harvard University entomologist E.O. Wilson, believe Earth is in the middle of a mass extinction comparable to the one 65 million years ago that wiped out two-thirds of land species, including the dinosaurs. “