New Population of Orangutans Discovered

By Cat Lazaroff

WASHINGTON, DC, November 22, 2002 (ENS) - The known number of orangutans in the world has increased by about 10 percent, thanks to a remarkable discovery by a team of researchers surveying a remote forest on the southeast Asian island of Borneo. The discovery by the team from The Nature Conservancy offers a rare opportunity for conservationists working to save the endangered primate.

The research teams documented 1,600 orangutan nests, indicating that between 1,000 and 2,500 orangutans are living within a 540 square mile (1,399 square kilometer) area of lowland forests in the province of East Kalimantan, part of the Indonesian portion of Borneo. This is the largest viable population of wild orangutans known to exist in East Kalimantan, a province about the size of New England.

An orangutan mother and child from the newly discovered population. (Photo © Timothy Laman/National Geographic Image Collection)

Orangutan experts echoed the Conservancy's excitement over this find. Earlier this month, the nonprofit Orangutan Foundation International (OFI) reported that the orangutan faces almost certain extinction within the next five to 10 years if the current trend in illegal logging and forest loss continues in its Indonesian rain forest habitat.

The newly discovered orangutan population offers new hope, said Dr. Birute Mary Galdikas, president of OFI.

"The discovery of a large, biologically viable, previously unsurveyed orangutan population in East Kalimantan is very significant," Galdikas said. "This find extends the orangutan's known range and gives us hope that we can save orangutan populations from extinction in the wild."

The Nature Conservancy team used a survey plan developed by Harvard University primate expert Andrew Marshall. Because spotting the rare and elusive orangutan is difficult and takes a very long time, Conservancy consultants recruited and trained indigenous Dayaks to identify and count orangutan nests, an accepted method for assessing the size of orangutan populations.

Using the survey results, Marshall then calculated the size of the orangutan population.

Experts predict that orangutans will go extinct in the wild by 2020 unless urgent steps are taken to protect the primates and their habitat. (Photo © Don Bason/The Nature Conservancy)

On Wednesday, the Conservancy signed a joint declaration with the Berau District of East Kalimantan - the district in which the orangutan population is located - and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry, committing all three parties to conserving and managing orangutan habitat in the district. The document states that the central and local Indonesian governments and the Conservancy recognize the orangutan's importance and the need to conserve its habitat.

The parties also pledged to protect the function and ecology of the orangutan habitat area and agree to promote forest conservation through forest certification. While the forest where the new orangutan population was found has not been heavily logged, it is facing pressure from both legal and illegal logging operations.

An estimated 14,000 to 25,000 orangutans are left in the wild, found only on Borneo and Sumatra, another southeast Asian island. Primate experts have predicted that orangutans will be extinct in the wild by the year 2020 unless immediate steps are taken to address threats to the animals' survival.

In 1997 and 1998, fires sparked by loggers and farmers clearing land destroyed more than five million hectares (12.3 million acres) of forest in Kalimantan, devastating orangutan populations and slashing the amount of habitat available to survivors.

The orangutan continues to lose habitat to uncontrolled deforestation and habitat fragmentation, and poachers regularly take the primates for food and the pet trade. For example, Indonesia, home to some of the Earth's most biologically diverse and threatened tropical forests, is also the world's top supplier of wood. It is estimated that 70 percent of the wood taken from Indonesian forests is harvested illegally.

Much of the orangutan's forest habitat has been logged or burned in recent years. (Photo © Le Kalimanthrope/The Nature Conservancy)

The Home Depot, a major hardware and home improvement chain, has pledged $1 million to the Conservancy, to be used over the next five years to combat illegal logging and promote sustainable timber harvesting. The Home Depot is the largest single buyer of wood in the United States, so the company's commitment is expected to have a major influence on the rest of the industry, even though less than one percent of the company's wood supply comes from Indonesia.

"The Home Depot has led the retail industry toward sustainable forestry by using its purchasing dollars to show the company's preference for certified wood," said Ron Jarvis, The Home Depot merchandising vice president for lumber and building materials.

The gift from The Home Depot augments funding provided since 2001 by the U.S. Agency for International Development for the conservation of orangutan habitat, combating illegal logging and promoting sustainable forest practices through work with the timber industry, local governments and indigenous Dayak villagers. Additional funding provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and private donors is paying for further orangutan surveys and other key habitat conservation efforts.