FOUR endangered mountain gorillas, including three adult females, have been killed by an apparent lightning strike in a Ugandan national park, said a conservation group.

A post-mortem has been performed on the four, including a male infant, that died on Monday in Mgahinga National Park in the southwest.

“Based on the gross lesions… the tentative cause of death for all four individuals is likely to be electrocution by lightning,” said the Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (GVTC) in a statement yesterday.

Laboratory confirmation will take two to three weeks.

The four were members of a group of 17 known as the Hirwa family that crossed into Mgahinga last August from Volcanoes National Park in neighbouring Rwanda.

“This is extremely sad,” GVTC executive secretary Andrew Seguya told BBC.

“The potential of the three females for their contribution to the population was immense.”

The other 13 members of the group have been found.

In 2008, it was estimated that only 680 of the great apes were left, but thanks to conservation efforts and anti-poaching patrols, their population has grown to more than 1,000.

Due to these efforts, in the same year, the mountain gorilla, a subspecies of the eastern gorilla, was moved from “critically endangered” to “endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of threatened species.

Covering the northern slopes of three volcanoes, Mgahinga is part of the Virunga massif shared with Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The massif is one of the most important conservation sites in the world, and one of only two places where mountain gorillas are found. – AFP, February 9, 2020.