5x5 Monkey Monday*: Five facts to prepare for my trip to help The Orangutan Foundation in Borneo
This summer I’ll be joining a handful of lucky people for a three-week volunteer programme with The Orangutan Foundation in Borneo.
Founded in 1990, The Orangutan Foundation works to conserve the critically endangered orangutans in their threatened habitats in Sumatra and Borneo. We’ll be helping them to renovate a research station in Pondok Ambung, situated within Tanjung Puting National Park.
It’s an organisation with multiple roles, from on-the-ground duties such as operating ranger patrols, caring for captive orangutans rescued from homes and local zoos, and re-introducing orangutans into the wild, to strategic aims like lobbying against the palm oil industry to protect the last hectares of rainforest and educating local people in ideas like extinction and biodiversity.
I’ve been working with The Gorilla Organization for the past month and learning a lot about gorillas (more to come on that), so I thought I’d start to work up my orangutan knowledge with a few facts about the hairy gingers of the Asian rainforest.
1 There are only two kinds of orangutan left Once upon a time, orangutans were found all over asian rainforests and there were many more species, but there are now just two distinct populations: the Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) and the Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo albelii). The Sumatrans are the tree-dwelling gingers, while the Borneans have more robust bodies and have three sub-species which vary from chocolate brown in the east to red-orange in the south-west.
They’re the ones I’ll be hoping to see when I’m not smashing my thumb with a hammer.
2 Orangutans are threatened by all of this: Palm oil, illegal logging, forest fires, illegal mining, human diseases, the hunting and pet trade. Imagine everything that threatens gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees in the Congo, but with an enormously powerful global agro-industrial business dropped on top, enabled by an often corrupt and secretive government. Fun facts: Europe consumes just under half of the world’s palm oil, and just under half of this is used for the greenwashing exercise of biodiesel.
Palm oil is supposed to be all-sustainable by now, but as with blood minerals in Africa, in reality it’s very hard to police the sourcing and management on the ground.
I could do a whole 5x5 on the threats to non-human primates (and probably will).
3 Orangutans aren’t really loners There’s a stereotype of orangutans being anti-social loners, but that’s partly driven by the fact that they spend so much time in trees that they’re much harder to study than the other ground-dwelling primates. Advances in tagging, GPS, drones, cameras and field biology have made it possible to study them in more detail in the past few years.
In reality, as adults they’re semi-solitary apes who get together for sex and travel, and the two things often go together, with recent evidence that females become fertile when certain trees fruit in abundance, bringing them together with males. As parents, the mothers care for their offspring for around seven years (fathers don’t do any parenting in the wild), while sub-adolescent males and females often live in groups.
They’re also long-range communicators, although their semi-social nature means they communicate vocally less than other apes.
4 Orangutans are smart tool users Orangutans have made popular research subjects for cognitive science, and they’re sometimes considered to be the smartest non-human primates.
They’ve been observed making tools for scratching themselves, insect-foraging, honey collection, to protect against stinging insects, and to shelter from rain and sun. They will also use branches to fish for fruit that’s out of reach, and have been seen to use one tool to create another. They’ve even been taught to chip a stone hand-axe in captivity. Captive orangutans appear to use blankets and leaves to create an illusion of solitude amongst other orangutans.
Crucially, some of this tool use is passed on as well as improvised by individual orangs, demonstrating that they’re capable of cultural transmission of knowledge.
5 The Orangutan Foundation also saves lots of other at-risk animals Looking after orangutans also protects other animals, and not only those who live in the same habitats protected by The Orangutan Foundation. Action against the illegal pet trade also results in them picking up birds and reptiles that shouldn’t be in captivity, rehabilitating and releasing them.
In 2016 the foundation rescued 33 wild orangutans and 36 other species including kites, sunbears and slow lorises, and planted 16,000 tree seedlings to repair the damage caused by forest fires in 2015 in the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve. Volunteers began construction of a new guard post to extend the reserve, which is now up and running.
* Because there isn’t a day that starts with P for primate.
