A gorilla species that's been called Africa's most-endangered primate has found an advocate in a League City girl.

Berit Doolittle, 11, learned about the Cross River Gorilla from her mother Daniette Hunter, who home-schools her in League City. Wildlife advocates say this particular species inhabits just a small region along the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, and its numbers may be below 300.

"She saw there were only 300 left, and she said, 'What are we going to do?'" Hunter says. Between February and early May, Berit surprised her mother by zealously firing up a fund-raising campaign, going door-to-door in her neighborhood, reaching out-of-town families, and recruiting a third-grade class at Bay Area Charter School to help.

"To put a little drive into her at the beginning, [Berit's grandfather] said, 'Whatever you raise, I'll match,' thinking she'd probably raise $40," Hunter says. It turns out Berit was able to raise $350-often a dollar bill or a handful of change at a time-and her grandfather honored his promise, bringing the total to $700. Hunter says her daughter did most of the work in collecting funds, while she and Berit's father pitched in $20.

Berit's goal was actually $1,000, but with the $700 raised, she and Hunter set out in search of a charity that would use that money for conservation efforts. They chose to send a check to the UK-based African Conservation Foundation.

Hunter says Berit has done all the research without a great deal of help from her parents. On the phone, Hunter has to double-check her information with Berit, who sounds very well-versed in the Cross River Gorilla's plight.

"One of the things that disturbed us the most was the bush-meat aspect of why the gorillas were taken," Hunter says. "It's not enough to set up an area and say, 'Don't hunt here.' They actually try to give alternatives to the local people."

Consulting Berit, she also notes that the species faces dangers from poaching, deforestation, and human viruses.

"I'm a biologist by training, and I'm thinking, 'There's nothing you can do,'" Hunter says. "I have this totally cynical worldview, but she's like, 'No, we can do something!'"

http://ultimateclearlake.com

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ON BEHALF OF OUR LOCAL TEAM, THANK YOU VERY MUCH BERIT!!!
Your funds and awareness raising efforts are very impressive and inspiring for us all!

A now critically endangered group of gorillas had split off into its own subspecies about 17,800 years ago, say researchers, who concluded that the evolution of the animal, the Cross River gorilla, was shaped by ancient climate change and, more recently, humans.

Some 1.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene Epoch, a common population of gorillas diverged into two species, western and eastern gorillas. Although the two species now live far from one another, they still look and behave quite similarly.

Based on their genetic work, Olaf Thalmann and Linda Vigilant of the University of Turku in Finland determine that the western species split into the Cross River and western lowland gorilla subspecies about 17,800 years ago. However, they found that some interbreeding continued until 420 years ago. Then, a century later, the number of Cross River gorillas plummeted sixtyfold.

Now numbering about 200 to 300 individuals, Cross River gorillas live in fragmented populations in highland forests on the Nigeria-Cameroon border. Western lowland gorillas, which live to the south, are more abundant. Still, the International Union for Conservation of Nature considers both these subspecies of western gorilla to be critically endangered.

The research team looked at DNA from living gorillas and from 100-year-old museum specimens to figure out the gene flow between the Cross River and western lowland gorilla. Their genetic analysis indicates that the two subspecies appear to have split at a time when Africa's climate was oscillating between aridity and humidity, causing forests to expand and contract. One forest refuge may have existed at the Cross River area during dry times, and isolation here may have prompted the emergence of the Cross River subspecies, the researchers suggest.

In the meantime, human activities were intensifying in the region. The first human settlers were the Bantu agriculturalists who arrived while forests were in contraction, as long as 2,500 years ago. Hunting, too, would have put pressure on gorilla populations, and firearms arrived in the 18th century. Then, beginning in the late 19th century, the human population began to increase dramatically.

"It is unclear what effect this loss of genetic diversity will have on the long-term viability of Cross River gorillas. But given that this bottleneck occurred so recently, it is possible that if the population was allowed to expand, the loss of diversity could be stopped," Thalmann said.

Their work appears in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

http://www.livescience.com

A Cameroonian environmentalist group is lobbying for the establishment of a new national park at Cross River on the Nigerian border to protect a little known sub-species of gorillas only living there.

The Cross River Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli) is the least known critically endangered sub-species of gorillas, living in the forest of both sides of the Cameroon-Nigeria boarder in numbers of 250 individuals.

Now, the Cameroonian conservation and wildlife protection group ERUDEF is hoping the little exploited habitat of the gorilla sub-species may be set aside as a national park.

The Fossimondi region close to Cross River is a poorly explored area with large biodiversity, the group holds, saying it urgently needs protection to prevent from further encroachment. Here, the fauna of West and Central tropical Africa intermixes, making it a unique site because of many endemic species, an ERUDEF expedition had shown.

The group has already launched a "bio-monitoring" project of great apes in the little mapped Bechati-Fossimondi-Besali forest area, including the endemic gorillas and forest chimpanzees. The project has already revealed a unique behaviour of the local chimpanzees, which seemed to have copied the gorillas' habits of ground nesting.

ERUDEF researchers emphasise that their studies of the Fossimondi region forests had just started, although already revealing that the ecosystem had unique qualities. The environmentalists are sure there are still many endemic species to be found and now fear that the unique forests may be threatened by loggers and encroaching farmers.

Therefore, hoping to achieve full-fledged protection of the forest area at the Nigerian border, the environmentalists are doing their best to make the site better known.

Earlier this year, ERUDEF managed to catch the interest of 'CNN', one of the main broadcasters in the US. 'CNN' sent a camera team into the forest region to make a documentary about "the rarest gorillas in the world." Disappointingly, however, the 'CNN' team was unable to find any gorillas on their short trip to Cameroon.

Meanwhile, ERUDEF has been seeking new collaborators world-wide to market their conservation issue. This week, a group of Czech nature scientists teamed up with ERUDEF to create the "Diehli Initiative" - referring to the Latin name of the gorilla sub-species - that aims at protecting the shrinking habitat of the unique great apes.

To gain the most attention to the initiative, gorilla and ape keeper of the Prague Zoo, Marek Zdansky, later this month is to lead an expedition to the Fossimondi forests, accompanied by a Czech documentarist. The Czech expedition's aim is to gather "financial, media and scientific support of current activities of ERUDEF."

While the environmentalists wait for state protection of the forests close to Cross River, they must rely on their own resources to protect the apes from poachers. ERUDEF obviously is doing a good work in this aspect, and has already convinced ex-poachers to serve as "eco-guards" to protect the gorillas.

The Cameroonian environmentalists managed to explain the former poachers the unique value of the sub-species, having them realise they were privileged to be the only ones to observe these impressive animals in the world. With new pride in their environment, the new eco-guards now try to stop others from poaching in the Fossimondi forests.

http://www.afrol.com

LONDON - HRH The Princess Royal (Princess Anne) tonight presented one of the world's top prizes for grassroots nature conservation - a Whitley Award - to Louis Nkembi of Cameroon, for his work to introduce community-based landscape and biodiversity management to the Lebialem Highlands - a refuge for many rare plants, birds and other animals, including chimpanzees, drills and Africa's most endangered great ape, the cross river gorilla.