5 Gorilla Conservation Groups to Support in Memory of Harambe

If you’d like to express your sadness over the death of the gorilla Harambe through positive action, nonprofit groups working to stem a startling decline in wild gorilla populations in equatorial Africa offer avenues to do that.

Harambe, a 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla, was shot dead on May 28 by a Cincinnati Zoo sharpshooter protecting a 3-year-old boy who had fallen into his den.

“There are numerous really wonderful organizations doing conservation and sanctuary work,” Benjamin B. Beck, a recognized wildlife conservation expert, told Patch.

Disease and other perils faced by wild gorillas, along with years between births, have left them teetering near extinction, according to the World Wildlife Fund. A 2010 United Nations report suggests gorillas may disappear entirely from large parts of the Congo Basin by the mid-2020s.

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Here’s how things stand now for gorillas, according to the World Wildlife Fund:

Western Gorilla

• Western lowland gorilla (G. g. gorilla): These gorillas are the most widespread, and possibly number up to 100,000.
• Cross River gorilla (G. g. diehli): Currently the world’s rarest great ape, their population is only 250-300 in a small highland forest on the border of Cameroon and Nigeria.

Eastern Gorilla

• Mountain gorilla (G. b. beringei): There are about 800 mountain gorillas left, and they live in two separate groups — the Virunga mountains in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, and the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda
• Eastern lowland or Grauer’s gorilla (G. b. graueri): There are only about 4,000 remaining after populations declined in recent decades.

All four subspecies are either endangered or critically endangered, and all are threatened by hunting for bushmeat, habitat loss, wildlife trade, and infectious diseases.

If you want to remember Harambe by helping his brethren in the wild, here are five non-governmental gorilla conservation groups to support:

• Gorillas have been a flagship species for the World Wildlife Fund, which for more than 50 years has been working to protect all four gorilla subspecies through anti-poaching and habitat conservation initiatives.
• The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International offers numerous ways to give in a variety of conservation projects aimed at improving the survival rate of gorillas. Help is needed to hire extra patrol in the forests to remove snares set by illegal poachers to trap gorillas and, the charity notes, any size gift can make a difference.
• The Gorilla Doctors save an ape at a time. An international team of veterinarians provide direct, hands-on care in the wild to mountain and eastern lowland gorillas.
• The Cincinnati Zoo is accepting donations in Harambe’s name to support the Mbeli Bai Study in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo. It’s one of several willd gorilla conservation efforts supported by the zoo, and is the longest-running field study of western lowland gorillas in the wild.
• The African Wildlife Foundation's various conservation projects include the Bwindi Mountain Gorilla Census. About half of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas live in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, where poaching, habitat loss, civil unrest and disease pose urgent threats to gorillas.

Image credit: Unidentified male western lowland gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo by Mark Dumont via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons license