and psychological aspects of their lives. They are hunted illegally for their skins and meat in Africa and captured to be sold to zoos. While defended as being economically profitable for restaurants and local people, it is a large contributor to the endangered status of the western lowland gorilla. They are also seen as a crop pest in western Africa because they raid native plantations and therefore destroy what would have otherwise been valuable crops. Threats Hunting and logging In tropical forest, gorillas are hunted to provide meat for the bushmeat trade. Logging also destroys gorilla habitats. Although logging diminishes gorilla habitats, it may also provide for increased herbaceous vegetation as a result of gaps in the tree cover. Destruction of gorilla habitat may harm the overall forest ecosystem. Western lowland gorillas are seed dispersers, which is beneficial to many of the animals in the forest, so their extinction could impact many other animals, which could over time destroy their current ecosystem. Population decline and recovery The western lowland gorilla population in the wild is faced by a number of factors that threaten its extinction. Such factors include deforestation, farming, grazing and the expanding human settlements that cause forest loss. There is a correlation between human intervention in the wild with the destruction of habitats and an increase in bushmeat hunting. Another of these factors is infertility. Generally, female gorillas mature at 10–12 years of age (or earlier at 7–8 years) and their male counterparts mature more slowly, rarely strong and dominant enough to reproduce before 15–20 years of age. The fecundity of females, or capacity of producing young in great numbers, appears to decline by the age of 18. Of one half of captive females of viable reproductive age, approximately 30% of those had only a single birth. However, these non-reproductive gorillas may prove to be a valuable resource since the use of assisted reproductive techniques aid in the maintaining of genetic diversity in the limited populations in zoos. Conservation In the 1980s, a census of the gorilla populations in equatorial Africa was thought to be 100,000. Researchers later adjusted the figure to less than half because of poaching and diseases. Surveys conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2006 and 2007 found about 125,000 previously unreported gorillas have been living in the swamp forests of Lake Télé Community Reserve and in neighboring Marantaceae (dryland) forests in the Republic