[skohan]

Just to put this in perspective, the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063, so this represents the symbolic adoption of over 3 times the mountain gorillas alive in the wild!

I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an internet meme, reckless asset trading, and a change in the trajectory of the fate an endangered species.

[tudorw]

Can someone get busy wrapping endangered species as NFT's and direct the funds accordingly, timing seems about right...

[edoloughlin]

Can someone get busy wrapping endangered species as NFT's and direct the funds accordingly'

Can't help but wonder how much habitat is destroyed by the generation of a token.

[nerdponx]

Use a proof-of-stake NFT!

[kylebenzle]

Done! Here you go:

https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a...

Suraurwanda, meaning “visit Rwanda” in honor of the growing tourism sector in Rwanda, was born into Mafunzo’s group on Nov. 30, 2018. His mother is Taraja, and because Mafunzo is the only adult male of the group, we do not need genetic testing to prove he is the father.

[s1artibartfast]

Just make a NFT with pen and paper

[curiousllama]

"Buy this sticky note it'll save the whales"

[arsome]

It's basically trading cards to save the whales, yeah. Nothing wrong with abusing the collector attitude to raise money for charity.

[TameAntelope]

Right, but then it actually does (or meaningfully helps), which is, I guess, the prestige.

[tarsinge]

Not that much compared to other direct or indirect causes.

[groby_b]

Uh... Selling a single token? 8.7MWh[1]

That's slightly less than the average US household consumes in a year.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-hot-effect-earth-climate/

[s1artibartfast]

This assumes that climate change/ CO2 is a significant impact on the gorilla populations.

In reality, bushmeat consumption, logging, farming, and mining are the main drivers or gorilla population losses.

[thebean11]

Creating a token does not consume any additional energy. Transaction volume does _not_ scale with mining so it's a really bad comparison.

The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")

[codebolt]

Bitcoin alone currently pollutes about the same as half the global airline industry. If cryptos really are the future, I weep for the planet.

[salawat]

The network is not secured if you just offload the externality to the international electrical grid. You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

[IgorPartola]

Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?

[doomslice]

Stellar (https://stellar.org/) uses a novel Byzantine agreement protocol (https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol?lo...) which practically eliminates it in comparison.

It is also insanely cheap (like $1... and even that is just "held" in the account and can be released later) to "mint" a new coin and thus is practically perfect for NFTs.

It's seen as sort of a joke in the crypto world by those who are only trying to make a buck (price of XLM, used for paying transaction fees, is relatively stable compared to others) but I think it's one of the few cryptos out there that has a chance of making a real difference in the world long term.

[beaconstudios]

Ethereum is switching to proof of stake. AFAIK (not a crypto guy) it's the second largest blockchain.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

Bitcoin is extremely resistant to change.

Ethereum is what all the articles about costly NFTs are written about. The proof of stake (low energy consumption) chain is already live and the proof of work chain will is scheduled to be shut down in 2 years. Faster if the miners try to revolt

[Paradigma11]

Tezos using PoS has been up and running for more than a year i think. You can mint NFTs here: http://nftz.fun/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/

[yreg]

Cardano – the 3rd largest currency by marketcap[1], after Bitcoin and Ethereum – uses proof of stake.

[1] - https://coinmarketcap.com/

[ric2b]

That's like saying that if my lamp uses 3W when I'm at my desk, surely it'll use 6W when I call someone over.

Blockchain energy usage is not really proportional to transaction volume, they're only connected in very indirect ways (more usage -> more adoption -> higher price? -> reward for mining a block increases in value -> miners can pay for more energy while still turning a profit)

[IanCal]

I think that was for 6 and for running the auction.

[hrvTGKFyDyko3aK]

Etherum will be PoS in like 2 years.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Just in time for fusion power.

[DennisP]

Fwiw the PoS network is already running, with $6 billion staked and 100,000 validators. Migrating the rest of the network is relatively simple, they're just being really careful with it.

[altspace]

Curious how that works? Parallel blockchain? But how do you “migrate”? Incremental migration?

[UncleOxidant]

Seems like I heard this 2 years ago.

[tudorw]

Energy usage is a recognised issue and while it offers challenges they are understood and developers are keen to address this. If you want to start deconstruction of the industrial military complex that would be just fine and might really start to change things, until then I argue there are more worthy targets for your ire than the energy use of an emerging technology.

[jonfw]

This is like saying that pollution is a recognized issue with fossil fuels and while it offers challenges they are understood and engineers are keen to address this.

There aren't always easy solutions and you can't hand wave aside a massive problem because 'our best people are on it'

[tudorw]

If fossil fuels producers had had the same level of awareness of environmental issues when that industry began we might not have the issues we have now, I think it's a poor comparison, my comment was acknowledging the issue and positing that an iteration of the technology could mitigate the problem.

[lupire]

Are you also opposed to EVs which also have the problem of high initial costs for early iterations of the tech?

[jonfw]

Costs (of EVs) are passed onto the consumer and thus self-regulate, whereas many of the costs of crypto's wasteful energy usage are distributed among society.

[tudorw]

Which token, which platform, there are more than 1

[MR4D]

GorillaCoin (tm).

[dmingod666]

Humans - that is problem number one. Like agent smith said in the Matrix. "Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet.." - Advocating for this cure will solve all the problems..

[beaconstudios]

The whole reason we care about the environment is so we can keep living in it. What should we do instead, leave the turtles to inherit the earth and yeet ourselves into the sun?

[blablabla123]

Exactly that. We destroy our tourist destinations, beaches, food sources, areas where to live, landscapes for desktop backgrounds, the air and the water. Lost in useless economic abstractions.

[rglullis]

A purely rhetorical, not-implying anything-in-any-way: if you believe people should kill themselves for the sake of other beings, why haven't you?

[smabie]

Useless? Sounds like you're using it.

[Kye]

You realize he was an antagonist, right? He's not someone to model.

[Supermancho]

I think the fan theory that Smith is The One is more compelling than casual narrative.

[morlockabove]

Physician, heal thyself, and thus preserve us from having to listen to your drivel.

[mszcz]

I don't think that cryptocurrency energy consumption is as big a problem as it's been recently painted in the media. Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.

Using a VISA card (for instance to make the same contribution to wild-life preservation) would use a fraction of the energy that's used to sustain cryptocurrencies, sure, but that's not a fair comparison. Using VISA requires a working settlement layer (because VISA transactions are reversable), banks, bank employees, bank buildings, international transfer support, international settlement layer, people handling those settlements, regulation, regulation enforcement etc. If you include all that then the energy usage of Bitcoin doesn't look all that bad.

[pas]

The estimated energy consumption of BTC is between the electricity consumption of Ukraine and Argentina.

It's as if everyone would be a banker in Ukraine and every building would be a bank.

Seems excessive.

[lifeisstillgood]

Thank you - I heard the 'if you add the costs of Visa / banking it evens out' and was not sure how to tackle it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina - 44 Million people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine - 41 M (handwaving around bits that got invaded etc)

So is the global population of the banking industry comparable to 41 M ?

UK employees: 1.1M US Employees: 8.3M

So I went round a few houses and there is a lack of solid stats. But I think I can go with a decent indicator.

The USA has about 7.5 % of GDP (1.5tn) in Finance Services, and 6.3M employees (2018). Now translate that up to the global GDP of 87TRN, and say the global finance sector is as large globally as in USA (generous assumption) and that give 7.5 % of 87TRN - 6.5TRN. At 4.2M employees per Trillion that gives us 27 M global employees.

Now there can be lots of hand waving, but if bitcoin uses same amount of electricity as Argentina, and Argentina has around 1.5 many people as the global finance sector, then bitcoins electrical use does seem very excessive.

https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united... -> 6.3 M employees, 1.5 Tn (USA), 7.5% of GDP

Bibliography:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298370/uk-financial-sect....

https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag50.htm

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030515/what-percent...

https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united... -> 6.3 M employees, 1.5 Tn (USA), 7.5% of GDP

[capitol_]

But here you are comparing apple and oranges.

The energy one technical component uses versus the energy that all the people that use another technology uses.

Bitcoin also have support systems around it, hardware production lines, and a lot of people who use it that you don't include in your comparison.

[krrrh]

And it’s estimated that there area only around 1 million active Bitcoin wallets.

[vmception]

And how many countries of energy does the other financial system use, for comparison?

[nradov]

That wouldn't be a valid comparison. There's a lot more to the other financial system than just currency and payments. Even if hypothetically the whole world adopted Bitcoin we would still need most parts of the other financial system.

[skohan]

How many orders of magnitude more transactions are handled by the financial system compared to bitcoin?

[sho_hn]

It's also Bitcoin _right now_. It's still growing!

[sho_hn]

I'm not sure if I'm being down-voted for being pro-Bitcoin or anti-Bitcoin at the moment, but to clarify: My point is that the Bitcoin energy consumption problem has been and is getting worse over time.

[lupire]

That's incorrect because electricity is only one form of energy consumed. Oil/gasoline for cars/heat and natural gas for heat are other forms

[mszcz]

I didn't do the math on this one, but it seems to me that the whole financial system (and all that's needed to ensure it's reliability and security) uses a bit more energy than Ukraine or Argentina.

[imtringued]

The infrastructure supporting hundreds of national currencies, hundreds of stock exchanges, thousands of banks, hundreds of payment providers and cryptocurrency exchanges vs a single distributed ledger (basically a piece of paper). Bitcoin has 200 million users at most if you are really generous. It's really not a fair comparison. You would have to combine all cryptocurrencies and their energy consumption to even approach a fair comparison.

The energy usage is only used for mining, it's not even used to secure and ensure its reliability on exchanges whose energy consumption is actually counted against the mining energy. The energy consumption will grow simply because Bitcoin is going up, not because Bitcoin is processing more transactions or providing value in any form. Yes bigger banks need more energy but they can also provide more services thanks to their increased size.

Bitcoin doesn't even compete with Banks because Banks offer loans, consolidate small deposits into large capital reserves, etc. Bitcoin doesn't compete with stocks because Bitcoin ownership doesn't represent an ownership stake in the Bitcoin industry or any other industry. Bitcoin doesn't compete with payment providers because it is too slow and expensive. Bitcoin doesn't compete against cryptocurrency exchanges. Ethereum with its uniswap protocol may do so but that's not Bitcoin. Ethereum provides more value for less energy consumption than bitcoin. The only thing Bitcoin really competes against is gold because of the proof of ownership. You own your Bitcoin in your wallet the same way you own your car or house (after paying your mortgage or car loan off of course).

Bonus:

Why did I compare Bitcoin to a piece of paper? Because the people working in finance are part of the finance system. In Bitcoin only the miners are part of the system. So ultimately you just have a fancy piece of paper on which you cannot write lies on. With the finance system it is closer to bodyguards guarding the paper and making sure nobody can write on it. Again, people are part of the system. It's not just the paper that is important.

[ohgodplsno]

The whole financial system actually has some usefulness: you can pay for things with it. Anywhere in the world. Without paying $30 in fees, without waiting for 3 days to clear. It's also not likely to run on 60% coal.

Since bitcoin zealots have moved to pretending that it's a "store of value", you can compare Bitcoin to the energy used to secure the gold in the world. Hint: it's much more worse.

[Sebb767]

And mining Bitcoin requires chip makers (including rare earth materials), the tech industry and the whole internet. If you include side channels in visa, you'll need to do the same for Bitcoin.

Yes, Bitcoin has advantages, but low energy consumption is not one of them.

[mszcz]

I never said it's energy usage is low. I said (more or less) that for what it is it's energy usage is low.

[simiones]

Bitcoin, at best, does what SWIFT does for the financial system. Comparing it with the entire global financial system is laughable.

For what it is, it consumes ENORMOUS amounts of energy.

[cycomanic]

What sort of calculation is that? Let's for a moment disregard the fact that banks do much more than just transactions, let's also ignore that there is more then the transaction energy in bitcoin (there are also people working for the miners, producing the hardware etc). Just the comparison between the number of transactions of the banking system (including credit cards) to the number of bitcoin transactions should tell you how different the scales are. There were around daily 400k bitcoin transactions. There were 100 Million credit card transactions per day in the US alone. That would mean if we were to transition to use crypto currencies as our main financial system we'd use more than all the energy we produce worldwide just for bitcoin. So bitcoin looks even worse after doing a bit more of a comparison.

[simiones]

> Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems.

...for a small village of maybe 1000 people? At the current transaction rate, they could barely handle that. And of course they don't handle disputes, loans, insurance, tech support, legal compliance, KYC and AML, or any other part of a financial system (you're even forgetting that someone needs to design and print the physical cards).

Bitcoin in particular does nothing more than verifying a handful of transactions per second (5? 7?) while consuming more electrical energy than all of the world's regular transaction processing hardware combined, perhaps with the exception of ATMs - which amounts to hundreds of millions of transactions per second, all over the world, in a truly decentralized system.

[epanchin]

A token that needed a regular transfer of funds to retain ownership would be really quite neat.

A contract that showed I am the adoptee of Harry the gorilla, and provides a regular income for the charity. If I can’t keep up the payment I sell the token.

Fail to pay or sell the token and it reverts to the charity issuer.

[viraptor]

You can do that without the NFT right now with many charities. If you want it publicly visible you can tweet your receipt.

[tudorw]

Yes, but I cannot buy, sell and speculate with that.

[ilikehurdles]

Well you can put the tweet up for sale or auction on eBay. Just like with NFTs, you wouldn’t actually be transferring the underlying asset, nor would the tweet actually be hosted within eBay (or an NFT chain) for some kind of archival purpose, nothing stops you from selling it again on Amazon or Craigslist or any other marketplace (or another NFT). If Amazon, EBay, or the company behind the NFT decides to close up shop, that’s it for your listing. Heck, just as with NFTs, you could put tweets you don’t even own in your listings, since you’re really just selling the listing with some media linked in it rather than transferring the media or the rights to it.

The problem of course is the word crypto doesn’t appear in any of the traditional platforms, so no hype/demand exists for your tweets there. Those users have also over time not only been trained to recognize scams, but are provided with a little bit of buyer protection if they end up buying something you couldn’t really sell them in the first place.

[colejohnson66]

Yep. Take a look at Jack Dorsey. He’s “selling” the first ever tweet as an NFT and it’s currently at 2.5 million dollars.[0][1] But what does that even mean to “sell” a tweet? It’s still visible to everyone at its permanent URL.[2] What’s stopping Jack from just auctioning it off again later?

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-is-selling...

[1]: https://v.cent.co/tweet/20

[2]: https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

[nerdponx]

I don't believe this at all.

If Jack Dorsey sold the "rights" to the first ever tweet, I'm confident someone would pay at least $1 million for it, even without an NFT involved.

The fact that there's an NFT involved makes it more valuable, because now the buyer can show off in more ways than one. But that's it.

There have always been, and always will be, rich people with more money than sense, who want to demonstrate their great wealth and worldliness by buying silly stuff to show off with.

[arrosenberg]

Not a judgement, but speculating on charitable giving is the worst idea I've ever heard.

[nerdponx]

Why do people say stuff like this?

You don't need email either, just write a letter or send a fax.

The point is that here is a piece of new technology that's part of a new vision for the future. Maybe you think it's an unrealistic vision, but that's no reason to sneer at people who disagree with you.

[viraptor]

Email is easier and provides more features than a letter or fax in most cases. (With both still having some use in specific cases like personal messages or gov regulated messaging) NFT is harder and doesn't seem to provide any features over current donations. (It's actually worse due to unstable exchange rates and large fees)

Unless the vision provides benefits we did not have before I will continue to sneer at "the same thing but on blockchain" ideas.

[nerdponx]

Some people think it's a good idea to have a distributed, immutable ledger for stuff like this, with the ability to make payments without depending on a handful of individual corporations like Paypal and Visa. The fact that it's "blockchain" is immaterial except that blockchain happens to be the technology that makes it possible.

There's so much knee-jerk opposition to "blockchain" stuff just because some nerds get too excited about it (and some people are trying to get rich off it). It makes no sense to me.

[prox]

Exactly, but you have to go with the tech latest fad as many here seem stakeholders in it. Once you are invested, you can’t criticize in the same way. It’s castles in the sky to me. It has “bubble” written all over it. There is little in NFC or Bitcoin-like technologies that I see as a great benefit to the human species. Love to be proven wrong with good comments of what that specific tech can do for humanity.

[hanniabu]

There's streaming (https://sablier.finance/), I'm sure this could be used. Although I'm not sure how it would be used in the NFT aspect. Maybe they could be used for gaming mechanism. "Upgrade your gorilla to a larger environment!" "Unlock a new toy!"

[jayp1418]

You can just delegate Cardano's ada and give those as Charity. Or check Wozx which is trying to bring efficient energy to industries so while helping animals you help save climate as well.

[scotty79]

NFT doesen't work like that. After minting it has nothing to do with the initial cause.

It could work if they released and auctioned new NFT for each gorilla periodically.

[hrvTGKFyDyko3aK]

You can create NFTs which programmatically collect royalties on each sale [0]. This royalty could be used for continued conservation efforts. I don't know much about programming smart contracts but I think one could be programmed such that if it isn't transferred within a certain period of time it could be burned the next time the user tries to transfer it.

[0] https://rarible.com/create/erc721

[vidarh]

You "just" need to tie each NFT to a specific gorilla and raise enough to find someone willing to sell an annuity tied to the expected lifespan of said gorilla.

Or just raise enough for the average investment returns from the one-off sales to fund the charity.

[colejohnson66]

But the person who the money/etherium is sent to could be the charity, no? As in, people donate their digital art or whatever to a charity and the charity auctions off the NFTs to raise money.

That’s the way real life charity fundraisers sometimes work: you donate a physical object and they sell it to raise money. The benefit over you selling at and donating the money is that you don’t have to deal with selling it. The usage of NFTs here would be to take advantage of the mass hysteria(?) surrounding them to drum up the price.

[elliekelly]

> The usage of NFTs here would be to take advantage of the mass hysteria(?) surrounding them to drum up the price.

You said the quiet part out loud!

[TigeriusKirk]

An NFT could work like that, though. There's nothing stopping someone from writing an NFT smart contract that directs a percentage (of any size, including 100%) of future sales to the initial cause.

The NFT standard itself is quite basic, nearly every NFT people talk about are controlled by smart contracts that expand on the standard.

[hanniabu]

Yeah, yearly support tokens for each gorilla

[xattt]

How about seniors living in long-term care to improve their living conditions as well?

[geoduck14]

They don't count. Let them wallow in their isolation.

[yitchelle]

A bizarre scenario would be a digital photo (NFT of sort) of the rare animal becomes extremely high value, and end up causing the animal to be extinct.

[ethbr0]

To be macabre, genetic sequencing an animal and then eradicating the species would increase the data value. Thankfully, posting an open sequence on the net would remove the rationale for the horrible part of that sentence.

[SyzygistSix]

Most likely the anti-poaching squads will get better funding. As it is they are poorly paid and do a lot of work with shabby equipment.

[arcsincosin]

Yes, this exists! [1]

[1]: https://wildcards.world/

[tudorw]

'Virtual Trophy Hunt', the Big 5, surely owning a Lion gives you serious flex these days? Not much more genuinely limited edition than an Iberian Lynx.

[plumeria]

It would be cool for trees in, for example, the Amazon and Madagascar. I would like to sponsor a Tahina spectabilis in its habitat.

[o_m]

Or take the adoption a step further and create an unique NFT for each Gorilla

[tudorw]

That's along the lines I was thinking, then they could be freely traded by collectors with some kind of profit share going back to those in a position to help.

[agumonkey]

Oh I can foresee a lot of old legendary trees as NFT

[internetslave]

Homes this is a great idea.

[patentatt]

I take this as a joke, but ... you may actually be on to something here. Like, seriously.

[Black101]

Institutions own more than 100% of GME and the people own more than 100% of gorillas... makes sense to me.

[throwei32423]

Gorillas are too hot; we need to pivot to other primates bro.

https://chimpsnw.org/

In all seriousness, Chimps who've been used and dumped for science need to be supported.

[codyb]

Orangutans are very endangered due to palm oil production.

I haven’t donated here [0] yet but according to Charity Navigator [1] it seems okay.

Once I get up and moving I’ll chip in a few bucks a month. I also do the Cheetah Conservation Fund [3] which is great.

[0] - https://orangutan.org/donate/

[1] - https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.progra...

[2] - https://cheetah.org/

[flimflamm]

I think this adoption on non-existent gorillas is perfectly in line with over shorting positions with Game stop stocks.

[rossmohax]

Gorilla squeeze is coming!

[twic]

Gorillas are going to the moon.

[christophilus]

That was Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 4.

[jdauriemma]

:diamond::hands::gorilla:

[dmos62]

> the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063

Who will be producing the rest of the gorillas?

[BelleOfTheBall]

When a momma gorilla and a papa gorilla love each other very much... (and significant resources are dedicated to keeping them safe, content and ready to procreate, which is what I'm assuming Reddit has achieved.)

[nonameiguess]

Okay, I laughed at this, but unfortunately gorilla mating is quite a bit more brutal than this, more like an aspiring young alpha discovers the last alpha has grown old and weak, murders him, then murders all of the children as well, enslaves the gorilla women, and periodically rapes them. All he really offers in return is he'll keep other up and comers from murdering their new babies until he also grows too old and weak.

But yeah, basically it's love.

[imbnwa]

Eh, female/male sexual relations amongst gorillas aren't as fantastically patriarchal as this, female Gorillas solicit males for sexual coitus themselves, including males other than the silverback, even after conception, and have even displayed homosexual tendencies[0][1][2][3], and they have preferences that have been genetically impressed on Gorilla males, which is why Gorilla males, unlike Chimp males, are not only amenable to interacting and playing with their own offspring but also those of others[4]. Their sexual lives aren't solely at the privy of the dominant male, waiting around for his urges passively, that's something of a fantasy. The dominant male is rarely the sire of all offspring in a troop, the has proven genetically.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3431b8twU-U

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19399838/

[2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19722225/

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOtDSysn2kA

[4]https://qz.com/1484989/male-gorillas-who-care-for-infants-ha...

[dmos62]

> But yeah, basically it's love.

Okay, I only giggled at the first one, but I laughed at this one.

[Cthulhu_]

I watched a film once where they got DNA from mosquitos embedded in amber...

[geoduck14]

It sounds like there is a short.

Quick! Everyone buy gorilla stock! We'll cause a gamma squeeze and put the brokers out of business.

#stonks #wsb

[tudorw]

Time :)

[ISL]

So someone is selling gorillas short in order to make it possible for WSB to be able to adopt >200% more extra gorillas than actually exist?

Sounds like par for the course?

[diarrhea]

Is that number accurate? If so, I think it's wild (no pun intended) that humankind knows the exact number of animals of that species, globally.

[skohan]

Officially this is an estimate, but having been where these animals live, I believe we can have an exact count. Keep in mind that when we say “globally” this means a tiny region straddling the border between Rwanda, Uganda and Congo.

We are talking about a few families of gorillas, some of which are tracked daily. There is a massive conservation effort on these animals, at least in Rwanda and Uganda, they all have names and I don’t think a gorilla is born without someone knowing about it

[ethbr0]

I believe it also helps that they live in social groups, aside from some solitary males.

So we're tracking (population / avg_group_size + misc_males) objects, as opposed to the entire population.

Example on the other end would be snow leopards (130+ sq km) and grizzlies (380+ sq km), which are mostly solitary and have huge ranges.

[distribot]

If there are really 1063 I would think conservationists could know about almost every one individually. That's smaller than the high school I went to. I know they are spread out over a wide area in a dense jungle but I think it would be possible.

[mattowen_uk]

This film explains it all: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095243/

At the worst point their numbers dropped to the mid 100s.

The main threat to them is poaching, and local wars.

For further info: https://gorillafund.org/

[lower]

You mean they've been short-selling gorillas?

[SyzygistSix]

No, we have been short-selling the environment gorillas live in. And people are straight up poaching gorillas as well.

[Cerium]

Sounds like someone is trying to corner the gorilla futures market.

[bpodgursky]

But seriously, there are more like 100,000 lowland gorillas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_lowland_gorilla. So there's plenty of adoption to go around.

[Tyr42]

Sounds like someone is shorting gorillas. Gotta hold and show them.

[triceratops]

You'd really need diamond hands to hold a gorilla. They're strong AF.

[jzig]

I don't want to draw a line between them. I want to draw a circle around them!

[jl6]

Fractional reserve gorillas?