How Many Great Apes Are There?

The great apes are more diverse – and more threatened – than many of us ever expected. We now recognize at least fourteen kinds of great ape: five taxa of gorillas, four of chimpanzees and the singular bonobo, all found in central and western Africa, plus four kinds of orangutans known from tropical Asia. Altogether the gorillas, bonobo and chimpanzees occur in twenty-one African nations; of the orangutans, one species is wedged into northernmost Sumatra, and the other (divided into three subspecies) survives on the island of Borneo.

Along with all other primates, the great apes are included in the IUCN Red List, a comprehensive survey of threats to our world’s biodiversity. The Red List provides conservation assessments for a tremendous array of threatened species – and it shows the great apes in near-universal decline. Only the mountain gorillas are precariously stable at best, and even so they are listed as Endangered, along with nine other taxa. The remaining four kinds of great ape are now flagged as Critically Endangered: the Cross River gorilla, with perhaps 280 survivors; the Virunga mountain gorilla, numbering no more than 380; the Bwindi gorilla, of whom some 320 are still alive; and finally the Sumatran orangutan, which may have all of 7500 heads, and whose populations are now in catastrophic collapse.

Each of these names in the tables below is a lineage which is almost lost – individuals with their quirks and ways, their own thoughts and loves and histories: each a race of beings unto themselves, trapped in a failing refuge which some of our own kind plunder without remorse. Each name touches on families and kindred, clans and populations, who are far more than the easy genetic shorthand we have made of them – they are each a nation persecuted, refugees within their own homeland, fading in the daylight of a world economy.

Their lives are priceless, of themselves; but their loss will mark us evermore – that knowing so much as we did, still we bowed to our blind hungers, and failed to spare our nearest kin.