He's hairy, his table manners are atrocious and he wants to be your friend on Facebook and Twitter.
No, it's not the ex-boyfriend. It's Muhozi, an endangered Ugandan mountain gorilla, who appears online as part of a fund-raising programme, the Friend-a-Gorilla campaign (www.friendagorilla.org), the Ugandan Wildlife Authority launched last month to help save the species.
About 340 mountain gorillas - nearly half of the 700-plus remaining worldwide - live in Uganda's lush Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. The rest live in the Virunga mountain range, which stretches from Uganda into Rwanda and the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.
Despite their size - a male silverback can reach over 2.1 metres tall and weigh about 225kg - the gorillas are threatened by poachers who kill them for meat, farmers and charcoal-burners who encroach on their habitat, and the indiscriminate bullets of rebels on the run. They must be protected by rangers with automatic rifles.
The Wildlife Authority is hoping people will befriend and follow a gorilla via popular online social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in return for a minimum US$1 donation.
"By paying US$1 to Friend-a-Gorilla, everybody contributes to the conservation of this species," says Moses Mapesa Wafula, head of the Wildlife Authority. The money will be used to hire more rangers.
Organisers say the campaign is the first time online social networking has been harnessed for conservation and hope it will generate US$100,000 in the first three months and a further US$350,000 within the first year. In return, gorilla friends will receive regular updates about their chosen animal from the rangers who visit them daily, be able to track their progress through the Global Positioning System (GPS), have their gorilla's picture on their homepage and be treated to relevant trivia - such as the fact that the name is derived from a Greek word, gorillai, meaning "hairy women".
The website features the six recorded mountain gorilla families in Uganda: Bitukura (with 11 members), Habinyanja (15), Kyaguriro (15), Mubare (5), Nshongi (31) and Nkuringo (17). Each family and its members have a profile and their colour-coded locations tracked via GPS on the site's Google Maps-powered directory. Virtual tracking will be available soon, according to the site.
About 10,500 tourists visit Uganda each year to see the gorillas. An entry permit for the park is US$500 per person. Last year, Uganda earned US$600 million through tourism and more than 90 per cent of the money was from gorilla tourism. Tourist receipts represent Uganda's second-largest foreign exchange earner.
Those who cannot afford to travel to see the gorillas in the flesh or who want to avoid the red ants, mud and tropical rain of their habitats can use the fibre-optic tentacles of globalisation to watch a mother grooming her children and juvenile males fighting for dominance, or even feel the rush of being charged by a hefty-looking silverback male.
"You will be able to learn more concerning the particular gorilla, its character, family and relationships," says Thomas Slater, the director of the conservation campaign's website.
"[Gorillas] are very similar to human beings. That's what makes many people want to look at them," says Wildlife Authority spokeswoman Lilian Nsubuga.
Although the gorillas remain endangered, the authority has registered growth rates of 12 per cent and watched the gorilla population double over the last 25 years, says Wafula.
Drafted in to help publicise the campaign, American actor Jason Biggs, star of the American Pie film comedies, says gazing into the eyes of a gorilla is like meeting an old friend.
"It was pretty surreal. I felt like when I made eye contact with the gorillas, it was like an out-of-body experience," said Biggs, after a face-to-face encounter at Bwindi. "It was mind-blowing."
Associated Press
Additional reporting by Reuters.
