The Animals and Plants of Nigeria That Are Vanishing — With Their Names and Their Numbers

In the freshwater swamp forests of Bayelsa State, a primate called the Niger Delta red colobus monkey lives in the upper canopy of marsh trees, eating young leaves and feeding its young in groups of 15 to 80. Science only formally discovered this monkey existed in 1993. In the roughly three decades since, its population has collapsed by more than 80 percent. Fewer than 500 individuals remain in the wild today, crammed into approximately 200 square kilometres of surviving forest in a region where oil spills, logging trucks, and bushmeat hunters work around the clock.

This monkey exists nowhere else in the world. Only in Nigeria. And Nigeria is losing it.

It is not alone.

A Country Sitting on Irreplaceable Life It Has Not Bothered to Count

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, Nigeria has a total of 23 critically endangered, 42 endangered, and 104 vulnerable animal species. Those are only the species that have been formally assessed. Thousands more have not been evaluated at all, which means the true scale of what is disappearing is almost certainly far larger than any official number suggests.

A systematic compilation of IUCN Red List data identified 164 threatened plant species in Nigeria alone, comprising 16 critically endangered, 16 endangered, and 132 vulnerable species. Of the entire list, 21 plant species are strictly endemic to Nigeria, meaning they grow nowhere else on earth. The primary threats documented include crude oil exploration, habitat destruction from agriculture, and excessive logging.

Sixteen critically endangered plant species. Twenty-one plants that exist only in Nigerian soil and nowhere else. Nigeria has no functioning national plant Red List of its own to monitor a single one of them.

This is the full weight of what is happening. Not a vague environmental concern. Specific named creatures. Specific known plants. Specific documented declines. And a government machinery that has yet to move with anything close to the urgency those numbers demand.

Species by Species, the Evidence

The Cross River Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli) is the rarest great ape on earth. The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Andrew Dunn, who has led conservation work on this species for years, estimates that about 100 Cross River gorillas live in Nigeria and roughly 200 in Cameroon, giving a total wild population of approximately 300 individuals. They survive in isolated forest patches along the Nigeria-Cameroon border, in the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and Cross River National Park, in small groups that rarely interact with each other. The limited territories of their natural population have led Cross River gorillas to be isolated approximately 200 kilometres away from other gorilla populations, raising serious concerns about inbreeding and genetic collapse.

The Niger Delta Red Colobus (Piliocolobus epieni) is a primate endemic to the western Niger Delta, known to science for barely three decades. The IUCN classifies the Niger Delta red colobus as Critically Endangered, based on an estimated population loss of over 80 percent over the last three generations, approximately 30 years, caused by hunting and habitat loss. Only about 500 individuals remain in the wild, concentrated in a 77-square-mile area in the southeastern portion of their historic range. Camera traps installed in December 2024 in a community conservation area in Bayelsa State captured the first-ever videos of this monkey, a stark reminder of how little Nigeria knows about what it is losing.

The Niger Delta Red Colobus has ranked among the world’s 25 most threatened primates for the last decade. There are no formal government-protected areas within the monkey’s range. Its survival currently depends entirely on a community-led conservation effort in the Apoi community of Bayelsa State.

The Nigeria-Cameroon Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti) is the rarest chimpanzee subspecies in the world. About 6,500 remain in total, with 1,400 to 2,300 of those individuals living inside Nigeria, found in the forests of the eastern borderlands, particularly in Gashaka-Gumti National Park in Taraba and Adamawa States.

Nigeria’s Elephants have reached a number that should stop every Nigerian cold. Nigeria’s elephant population has declined by 99 percent, and the country now supports only 300 to 400 elephants in total, comprising 200 to 300 African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) and about 100 savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana). Nigeria’s largest elephant population is in Yankari Game Reserve in Bauchi State, with smaller remnant populations in the forests of southern Nigeria and a transboundary herd in the northeast using the Borno savannah as part of their range. In August 2024, Nigeria launched its first-ever National Elephant Action Plan covering 2024 to 2034, an acknowledgement that without a structured intervention, these animals face local extinction.

The West African Lion now survives in Nigeria in only two locations, Kainji Lake National Park and Yankari Game Reserve. Approximately 50 lions remain in Nigeria, and their habitat is shrinking every year. More than 90 percent of the lion’s original range across Africa has already been lost.

The Ibadan Malimbe (Malimbus ibadanensis) is a small black-and-red weaver bird found only in southwestern Nigeria. It was discovered in 1951, was once common, and has been in freefall ever since. The population is estimated at approximately 2,500 individuals for its remaining range of about 112 square kilometres of non-contiguous and severely fragmented forests in south-west Nigeria. The species was last recorded in 2008 in Ifon Forest Reserve, now Osse River Park. Nigeria has four bird species endemic to the country, the Ibadan Malimbe, the Anambra Waxbill, the Rock Firefinch, and the Jos Plateau Indigo Bird, meaning that if Nigeria’s forests disappear, these four species disappear with them and exist nowhere else on earth.

The Drill Monkey (Mandrillus leucophaeus), a large forest primate in southeastern Nigeria, shares its range with the Cross River gorilla. According to the IUCN, drill populations have declined significantly due to deforestation and hunting for bushmeat. As of 2017, the global population of mature individuals is estimated at around 4,000 and continues to decline.

The White-bellied Pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis), classified as Endangered by the IUCN, has become the most trafficked mammal in the world, and Nigeria is the principal hub for that trafficking. According to the Wildlife Justice Commission, 55 percent of pangolin scale seizures worldwide between 2016 and 2019 were linked to Nigeria. A study published in Biological Conservation found that Nigeria-linked pangolin product seizures between 2010 and September 2021 totalled 190,407 kilograms, representing at least 800,000 to as many as one million dead pangolins. Despite this, total prosecutions for pangolin trafficking in Nigeria amount to just four.

The Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus), classified as Endangered, has been heavily captured from Nigerian forests for the global pet trade. Other species living under serious threat in the Niger Delta ecosystem include the Home’s Hinge-back Tortoise (Kinixys homeana), the West African Dwarf Crocodile (Osteolaemus tetraspis), the Red-capped Mangabey (Cercocebus torquatus), and the Nigerian White-throated Monkey (Cercopithecus erythrogaster pococki), all confirmed from Nigerian habitat.

The Forest That Cannot Protect Itself, and the Law That Hasn’t Protected It Either

Every species listed above depends on forest or freshwater habitat. Every one of those habitats is under assault.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations rates Nigeria as having the world’s highest deforestation rate of primary forests, losing more than half of its primary forest between 2000 and 2005. Deforestation estimates for Nigeria stand at 163,000 hectares per year, with 12 percent of tree cover lost between 2001 and 2022.

The Niger Delta presents its own particular horror. The Niger Delta red colobus’s habitat bore the brunt of more than 7,000 oil spills that released at least 13 million barrels of crude oil into the region since the 1950s, according to the United Nations. The recurring spills polluted the region’s waterways and forced fishing-dependent communities to take up logging, which then devastated the forest the monkey depends on.

Rachel Ashegbofe Ikemeh, founder and director of the SW/Niger Delta Forest Project, has spent over a decade working to protect the red colobus in Bayelsa State. When she first visited the range in 2013, she found the forest floor soaked in knee-deep crude oil.

“There is really nothing that can be compared to observing a large group of monkeys in the wild, feeding, playing, and scurrying off from human view,” she told the African Wildlife Foundation. She has dedicated her career to ensuring that observation remains possible.

The accountability in this story sits at multiple levels. National parks are underfunded and understaffed. Andrew Dunn of the Wildlife Conservation Society noted that three of Nigeria’s seven national parks have been taken over by bandits and insurgents, making scientific monitoring and conservation enforcement effectively impossible inside those boundaries.

The 1985 Endangered Species Act, Nigeria’s foundational wildlife law, went unamended for 31 years. An amendment in 2016 raised penalties for wildlife crimes, with the fine for killing a First Schedule animal rising from just N1,000 to N5 million. But N5 million has not deterred the organised criminal networks moving tens of millions of naira worth of pangolin scales and elephant ivory through Nigerian ports in single containerised shipments.

The Nigerian Senate approved the Endangered Species Conservation and Protection Bill, 2024, the most significant overhaul of Nigeria’s wildlife protection framework in nearly four decades. It passed the House of Representatives in May 2025 and the Senate in October 2025. As of press time, President Bola Tinubu has not signed it into law.

The bill would empower investigators to trace financial flows behind wildlife crime, fast-track prosecution, and align Nigeria’s legal framework with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). It would replace a law written when some of the species now facing extinction had not even been formally discovered.

Nigeria has become the main exit point for wildlife products from Africa, with nearly a quarter of the world’s seized ivory shipped through Nigerian ports.

Terseer Ugbor, the bill’s sponsor and Deputy Chairman of the House Committee on Environment, said plainly, “This Bill sends an unambiguously clear message that Nigeria will not tolerate the use of its borders for trafficking of illegal wildlife products, such as pangolin scales and ivory, to foreign markets.”

The Federal Ministry of Environment did not respond to The Gazette News’ requests for comment on the timeline for presidential assent as of press time.

What Ordinary Nigerians Stand to Lose

None of this is abstract. Every species in this report performs a documented ecological function that affects human life.

Pangolins are the only scaled mammals on earth and are primary insect controllers in their forest ecosystems. As Professor Olajumoke Morenike, a researcher at the University of Ibadan who studies pangolin conservation, explains, “They contribute to the health of the soil and control insect populations.” Lose the pangolin and the insect pressure on farmland surrounding forest edges increases directly.

Forest elephants disperse seeds across distances no other animal can match, regenerating the very forests that regulate Nigeria’s rainfall and river flow. Nigeria has already lost 99 percent of its elephant population, leaving just 300 to 400 animals to perform ecological services that once stretched across the country’s forested south.

The Niger Delta red colobus, as a seed disperser and canopy species, plays a documented role in maintaining the forest structure of the very wetlands that buffer coastal Bayelsa communities from flooding.

Of the 164 threatened plant species in Nigeria identified by IUCN data, the most represented threatened family is Rubiaceae, with 18 species. Many of these plants carry ethnomedical value; 77 endangered medicinal plant species have been documented in Cross River National Park alone, plants that rural communities have used for centuries to treat illness. When those plants disappear, the knowledge embedded in communities that live near them disappears with them.

Mama Ngozi, a farmer in Akamkpa Local Government Area, Cross River State, grows crops on land that edges up against the national park boundary. She has watched the forest move closer to her farm every season.

“Things my grandmother used to collect from the forest for medicine, I don’t find them anymore,” she told The Gazette News. “The trees are gone. The animals are quiet. The whole thing has changed.”

She cannot name the species she has lost. But she can feel their absence.

The Niger Delta red colobus monkey survived for thousands of years in its swamp forest before oil companies arrived. The Cross River gorilla survived in its montane corridor through wars, colonisation, and every disruption Nigeria has ever faced. The Ibadan Malimbe survived in the remnant forests of southwestern Nigeria even as Ibadan grew into a megacity around it.

All of them are now being lost in the span of a single human generation, on the watch of institutions that have the laws, and sometimes even the plans, but have yet to move at the speed the numbers demand.

The Wildlife Conservation Society called Nigeria’s elephant situation “desperate, but not hopeless.” The same phrase applies to almost every species in this report.

Desperate. But not yet hopeless.

Whether it stays that way depends entirely on what happens next.