'A global tragedy'

Fires raging in an Indonesian swamp forest may have killed a third of the rare Sumatran orangutans living there and all of them may be lost this year, conservationists warned Wednesday.

The Tripa swamp forest in Aceh province is home to the world's densest population of critically endangered Sumatran orangutans. About 200 still live there, out of a world population estimated at 6,600, the conservationists said.

More from AP here.

Killing orangutans

Researchers estimate that between 750 and 1,800 orang-utans were killed in the year leading up to April 2008. In previous years, however, things were even worse: the researchers calculate that between 1,950 and 3,100 were killed each year. These killing rates are higher than previously thought and are high enough to pose a serious threat to the continued existence of orangutans in Kalimantan.

-- report, original paper.

A world teeming with giant orangutans

There may have been many different kinds, they used to be in all sorts of places, and some of them were very large: Darren Naish outlines some of what is known, and some of what is not.

Naish includes this from an 1849 account of the slaughter of a large male:

Those who aided in this slaughter acknowledged that they were distressed by the human-like expression of his countenance, the piteous manner in which he applied his hands to his wounds, and the whole bearing of the dying combatant. They confessed that the sight was such as almost to make them question the nature of the act they were committing.

Through a glass

Perhaps it is objectively true that only poetry can talk of birth and origin. Because true poetry invokes the whole of language (it breathes with everything it has not said), just as the origin invokes the whole of life, the whole of Being.

The mother orangutan has come back, this time with her baby. She is sitting right up against the glass. The children in the audience have come to watch her. Suddenly, I think of a Madonna and Child by Cosimo Tura. I'm not indulging in sentimental confusion. I haven't forgotten I'm talking about apes any more than I've forgotten I'm watching a theatre. The more one emphasizes the millions of years, the more extraordinary the expressive gestures become. Arms, fingers, eyes, always eyes...A certain way of being protective, a certain gentleness -- if one could feel the fingers on one's neck one would say a certain tenderness -- which has endured for five million years.[1]

-- from Ape Theatre by John Berger (1990).

Footnote

[1] More likely, the last common ancestor of orangutans and humans lived about 13 million years ago.

Orangutan oratorio

Research indicates that (some) orangutans make wind 'instruments' out of folded vegetation, blowing through it to modulate the sound of their alarm calls (reports here and here). This makes them the only animal apart from humans known to use tools to manipulate sound.

I happen to be researching (and attempting to write about) the origins and significance of human music at the moment, so especially enjoyed this. As Robert Shumaker of the Great Ape Trust says, "It's really, really nice to see an example [of tool use] that has absolutely nothing to do with food."


(see also the funky gibbon)

Report to the Academy

How to keep species alive that seem overwhelmingly threatened with extinction? I've yet to see the remarks made last night by Richard Leakey [1]. On Thursday a debate at the Linnean Society will focus on great apes. [2]

In some parts of the 'real' world, such as Russia, the fate of some large species is less debated. 35 of the 130 gray whales estimated to remain in the Western Pacific are thought to be breeding females. The Sakhalin Energy consortium has promised not to undertake underwater seismic work, but other oil and gas firms working in the region, including BP, Exxon and Rosneft, plan to continue even though this will interfere with their well-being. Perhaps these corporations tell themselves, "why worry? There are 20,000 or more gray whales on the West coast of North America. And these 'ghosts' are toast anyway."


Footnotes

[1] His talk on climate change and extinction will be archived at RoyalSociety.tv. On 19 May the Society hosts a discussion titled Making choices to conserve the world’s species: what, where and when?.

[2] 'The Great Ape Debate', trailed by The Guardian as Experts feud over how to save apes.

The ends of the earth

At the heart of a 2-million-acre forest area situated in the rugged Sangkulirang limestone mountains in East Kalimantan Province, a survey reveals 219 orangutan nests. It is quite likely, says Erik Meiyaard, that this area has a population of several hundred orangutans, and possibly more than a thousand.

About 50,000 orangutans may remain in the wild, says the BBC report.

Captives

Ben Beck...once noted that if you give a screw-driver to a chimpanzee it will try to use the tool for everything except its intended purpose. Give one to a gorilla and it will rear back in horror -- "Oh my God, it's going to hurt me" -- then try to eat it, and ultimately forget about it. Give it to an orangutan, however, and the ape will first hide it and then, once you have gone, use it to dismantle the cage.

-- Eugene Linden

(Jason Hribal is angrier)

In Man's hands

"Orang-utans and lion latest victims of China milk scandal" -- report

Going ape

In 2003 Kevin Kelly bet Stewart Brand that:

by 2025 the scientific evidence of a hither-to-unknown large bi-pedal great ape will be sufficient to convince at least 50% of primatologists that a yeti/bigfoot-like creature exists.

I wonder if by 2025 the only living orangutans will be those associated with artificial breeding programmes.

Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:

On the 12th of May [1855] I found another, which behaved in a very similar manner, howling and hooting with rage, and throwing down branches. I shot at it five times, and it remained dead on the top of the tree, supported in a fork in such a manner that it would evidently not fall. I therefore returned home, and luckily found some Dyaks, who came back with me, and climbed up the tree for the animal. This was the first full-grown specimen I had obtained; but it was a female, and not nearly so large or remarkable as the full-grown males [I had previously shot]. It was, however, 3 ft. 6 in. high, and its arms stretched out to a width of 6 ft. 6 in. I preserved the skin of this specimen in a cask of arrack, and prepared a perfect skeleton, which was afterwards purchased for the Derby Museum.

Only four days [later] some Dyaks saw another [one] near the same place, and came to tell me. We found it to be a rather large one, very high up on a tall tree. At the second shot it fell rolling over, but almost immediately got up again and began to climb. At a third shot it fell dead. This was... a full-grown female, and while preparing to carry it home, we found a young one face downwards in the bog. This little creature was only about a foot long, and had evidently been hanging to its mother when she first fell. Luckily it did not appear to have been wounded, and after we had cleaned the mud out of its mouth it began to cry out, and seemed quite strong and active. While carrying it home it got its hands in my beard, and grasped so tightly that I had great difficulty in getting free...

Wallace and his servants looked after the orphaned infant for some time, but it contracted a fever and

lost all appetite for its food, and, after lingering for a week a most pitiable object, died, after being in my possession nearly three months. I much regretted the loss of my little pet, which I had at one time looked forward to bringing up to years of maturity, and taking home to England. For several months it had afforded me daily amusement by its curious ways and the inimitably ludicrous expression of its little countenance...

Exactly a week after I had caught this interesting little animal, I succeeded in shooting a[nother] full-grown male Orangutan...