Saving the Gorillas—and Launching a Nation's Tourism Economy

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/saving-the-gorillas-and-launching-a-nations-tourism-economy/278269/


A critically endangered western lowland gorilla outside Wilderness Safaris' Odzala Ngaga Camp, in the Ndzehi Concession of the Republic of Congo, at the epicenter of the 2002-03 Ebola epidemic. (James Sturz)

In November 2002, gorilla trackers outside the village of Mbomo, in the Republic of the Congo, came upon a group of apes that were stressed. One of the trackers described the females as crying. Then the men began finding carcasses in the forest: heaps of matted hair and liquefied organs oozing blood. In a period of four months, 130 of the 143 gorillas the trackers were following died. Later that same year, another 91 of 95 gorillas they were studying were gone.

Few words cause a greater chill in any language than "Ebola," the hemorrhagic fever and lethal virus first detected in equatorial Africa in 1976. Most initial human cases come from contact with infected animals, including consuming them as bush meat--often the most-accessible source of protein in places where there aren't cattle.

This is likely what occurred in Mbomo, where 178 villagers were diagnosed with Ebola during that same year. The cascading symptoms include acute fever, diarrhea, nausea, liver failure, and bleeding from every orifice. Incubation takes days. There is no cure. In Mbomo, the mortality rate surpassed 87 percent. But those numbers don't include the villagers who were executed with machetes for ostensibly practicing sorcery, which some in Mbomo believed the virus indicated. Or the reported scores of local hunters who disappeared into the forest, never to return. Or the additional cases of Ebola just 23 miles away, in neighboring Gabon, where another 43 villagers died.

Magda Bermejo was a Spanish primatologist working in the forests around Mbomo at that time. In 1994, she'd come to this swath of central Africa, where 80 percent of the world's gorillas and chimpanzees are believed to live. This is where she'd seen her first gorilla in the wild, and in 1998 she became the first person to "habituate" western lowland gorillas to human presence, the crucial and grueling precursor to studying them. The process takes three years and requires locating groups and visiting them every day--often over an area of a dozen square miles or more. It also requires cutting and maintaining paths in the thick rainforest so you can reach the apes at all.