UPDATE: How Reddit followers surprised Atlanta-based gorilla nonprofit

Reddit’s guerrillas have come to the aid of gorillas, and that’s been a very good surprise for a small nonprofit based in Atlanta.

Since March 13, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, dedicated to protecting gorillas, has received a groundswell of donations from an unlikely source: investors on a Reddit forum, WallStreetBets, better known in national news for boosting the stock price of GameStop.

They donated more than $400,000 to the Georgia nonprofit.

“We were surprised, thrilled and appreciative when we first heard that the WallStreetBets community was investing in our work,” Tara Stoinski, the organization’s chief executive and chief scientific officer, wrote in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is a huge deal to our organization.”

WallStreetBets became a central forum for investors taking on hedge funds that had bet against video game retailer GameStop and other companies by shorting their stock. The Reddit movement helped put GameStop’s share price on a rollercoaster, with stunning peaks and sharp falls.

Investors banding together on the site sometimes refer to themselves as apes, apparently a reference to the line “Apes together strong,” from the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Recently, a member of WallStreetBets highlighted one of the Fossey nonprofit’s fundraising efforts, the symbolic adopting of a gorilla. Others joined in.

In less than 48 hours, the Fossey organization received more than 2,000 new adoptions. In a typical weekend it might normally get 20. The giving continued, though it has since slowed.

The nonprofit focuses on conservation and study of gorillas in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is named after Dian Fossey, a researcher who wrote the book “Gorillas in the Mist.’’ She was later murdered in her cabin in Rwanda. Her story was made into a movie starring Sigourney Weaver.

The organization had $6.7 million in revenue in 2019. It’s been raising funds for construction of a research and education campus set to open this year in Rwanda.