The Lesson of Mountain

Gorillas
Introduction: The environment and organism are affected by abiotic and biotic
communitys including relationships between organisms and the physical environment.

Accomplish:
Graph the data on the Mountain Gorillas population in Congo from 1989-2017
Determine the different factors that make the population change
Background: Before 1989, the Gorillas at Congo were estimated to be about 17,000 of gorillas.
As of this time in the 80s they say that around this, this is what made us also around this time the
environment was good there was nothing really going on that could harm the Mountain Gorillas.
Unfortunately, by this time in Congo around the 1990s civil unrest started to start out and
there was many killing of people and animals because of different tribes. The civil unrest hit the
Mountain Gorillas very hard with only 620 Mountain Gorillas living in the Congo.
Signs started to pop out because after the civil unrest, there was still a small amount of
Mountain Gorillas left. The population never did an exponential and they were much under
carrying capacity, which meant that the Mountain Gorillas are Critically Endangered. Now as the
time it in 2006 and there is only 340 Mountain Gorillas left, so now we know we have a huge
problem and we have to do something about it.
The environmental department in Congo started to realize what was going o so they
started to stop illegal trading and promote more of environmental practices. These solutions
started to help the increase of the Mountains Gorillas of having 880 Gorillas in the year of 2017.
But there still is question about why the Mountain Gorillas are not reproducing as we thought
that would be.
Today, the Mountain Gorillas are still critically in endangered with only 880 in Congo.

DATA
1. Graph the Mountain Gorilla population data. Place time on the X axis and number of
gorillas on the Y axis
Year Mountain
Gorilla
Population
1989 17000
1998 620
2003 380
2006 340
2010 480
2017 880
1. What did the environmental in Congo decide to do when
they noticed the population was decreasing rapidly?

2. Were these methods successful? Use the data to support answer

3. What started the decline of the Mountain Gorillas?

4. Based on the methods they used, what have you have done differently to help the
Mountain Gorillas? And why?