Please stay, Mr. Gorilla

John R. Platt has this blog called Extinction Countdown that fascinates me, as it is not short of entries about endangered species.

This mountain Gorilla we can easily identify in the picture is affected by current climate changes. 

"According to some climate change models, the current habitats for mountain gorillas in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo could become completely unsuitable for the massive primates for the year 2090." - John R. Platt (1st Oct, 2013)

As climate change alters vegetation, the habitat of mountain gorilla will subsequently be affected as well. First of all, climate change velocity is used to measure the local rate of displacement of climatic conditions over Earth surface. This also includes the local rate at which species must migrate due to changing climate. Using this indicator, Sandel et al. described that species distributed in topographical homogenous landscapes will experience higher climate change velocities. For instance, species can adapt by shifting uphill, instead of tackling a 1°C increase in temperature in the originated flat areas. In other words, species will require stronger dispersal abilities, if they were to remain in a homogenous landscape. These species are also less prone to extinction as they are more capable of maintaining distributional equilibrium with climate conditions. Just imagine if species with weak dispersal abilities continued to move uphill while climate changes, they will end up at the top of mountain (if they can manage to survive there) and have no place to migrate. Thus, they would walk towards extinction. It is uncertain whether this would happen to Mountain Gorillas, but they do escape to avoid humans and move to higher latitudes with their long and thick fur. 

Notably, although climate change is one main factor that threatens the mountain gorillas, other human factors such as deforestation has also contributed to destroying its habitat…

Some of them were captured on camera last year. 

2012 National Geographic

Video courtesy Wildlife Conservation Society

I strongly recommend you to read more if you are interested. Think about how human activities in this already changing environment poses a significant negative impact on endangered species. In this example, it seems like both the force of nature and human activity are contributors to global warming that pushes mountain gorillas towards the edge of extinction.