Where do gorillas live?
Gorillas only thrive in the tropical African forests that have got dense forest cover marked with good quantities of rainfall throughout the year. This nature of the environment is ideal for their survival in terms of food production and ideal climate. Gorilla settlement is distributed in scale with two notable differences that have got a 900km in between. This varying settlement led to the emergence of eastern and western gorillas that are known to have split from one another approximately 2 million years ago. Their split is attributed to the occurrence of the last ice age that disintegrated the tropical rain forests of central Africa creating bare patches in between that were later occupied by Savannah vegetation in which gorillas could not thrive. Thus the gorilla groups that had remained in different forest refiguims on different sides had no means of uniting again. Even when the rainforest regenerated to adjoin the different forest refugiums, the gorillas could not draw to the same direction thus creating lasting differences that saw them change not only in their external; characteristics but also in their genetic makeup.
The gorillas that had remained on the eastern side also later split leading to the emergence of eastern lowland gorillas and mountain gorillas about 400,000years ago. The Mountain gorillas apparently thrive in the volcanic highlands that form the Virunga massif and in the hilly geographical environment of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. They are apparently on the IUCN Red list and are categorized as critically endangered.
In contrast to the Mountain gorillas that thrive in Mountainous landscapes, the eastern lowland gorillas thrive in the lowland forests of Congo while the western gorillas thrive in the rainforests of West Africa.
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