An international team of scientists, tracking gorillas and chimpanzees through thick African rain forests, reported Sunday that ape populations have been ravaged by the deadly Ebola virus and illegal hunting and soon could face extinction.

For the past 20 years, the researchers estimated, humanity's closest genetic cousins have suffered catastrophic losses in Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to some 80 percent of all gorillas and most of the world's chimpanzees.

The findings contradict a 1995 estimate that assured relative stability among wild ape populations, suggesting some 110,000 gorillas would continue to inhabit the forests of western equatorial Africa. The new study, which does not specify numbers, calculates a 56 percent ape decline in Gabon between 1983 and 2000. In view of the greater human rural population and deforestation rates along with a raging Ebola epidemic in Congo, the scientists said they expect to see an even bleaker picture there.

"The stark truth is that if we do not act decisively, our children may live in a world without wild apes," the 23 study authors from the United States, Gabon, England, Spain and Scotland wrote in an advance online issue of the British journal Nature.

They urged tightened enforcement of anti-poaching laws, establishment of protected areas to safeguard the remaining apes and expanded efforts against Ebola -- a thus far indestructible, often lethal microbe that gnaws through tissue, making bloody mincemeat of the body's internal organs.

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