Hello, How Are You Doing?
Groundbreaking Research Has Scientists Talking With Apes
By JOHN BERMAN

May 29, 2007 —

The Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, is home to seven bonobos — a close relative of the chimpanzee — and three orangutans. But if you think Iowa might be a strange place for them to live, don’t say it out loud & these apes understand English.

Really. No kidding.

Watch John Berman’s interview with a bonobo tonight on “World News With Charles Gibson”

You can talk to the apes, and they know what you are saying.

The residents of the Great Ape Trust are part of groundbreaking language research where the apes are being taught to communicate with humans by pressing 350 lexigrams — symbols that appear on a screen and represent thoughts and objects.

The superstar is 26-year-old Kanzi, whom Bill Fields has been working with for years. To communicate, Fields speaks to Kanzi, who then points to the lexigrams to respond and demonstrate a level of understanding.

“Qualitatively, there is no difference between Kanzi’s language and my language,” Fields said. “It’s a matter of degree.”

The key to ensuring they grasp the language, the researchers said, is to start teaching them when they are young, just like you would with human babies.

“Language is culturally acquired. Its not learned,” said Fields. “It’s acquired in the immediate postnatal antogyny of the organisms life. The only organism capable of learning language are babies.”

They’ve been communicating with bonobos through the keyboard for almost three years, relying on a technique developed in 1971 and also used at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University and other facilities.

At the Great Ape Trust, researchers said the apes would likely never be able to vocalize words like humans; they are limited by the range of their vocal chords among other things.

However, Fields swears he has heard Kanzi try to say “thank you.”

‘Surprise’ From an Interview With an Ape

When they begin to work with the apes, some pick up the vocabulary quickly while others never acquire the language.

Rob Shumaker has known Azy, a majestic, huge male orangutan, for more than 20 years. He talks to Azy, just like he would speak to one of his children, or a longtime friend.

“When I’m around them we just kind of talk normally,” he explained. “I use my normal vocabulary, my normal voice my normal gestures.”

Sound beyond belief? During a visit to the Great Ape Trust, I sat down with Kanzi the Bonobo — the first Ape I have ever interviewed.

I read Kanzi a series of words, and then without fail, he hit the corresponding lexigram symbol on a touch screen.

I said “Egg.”

He pressed “Egg.”

I said, “M and M.”

He pressed “M and M.”

Then Kanzi took control of the conversation and pressed the symbol for “Surprise!”

Needless to say, I was quite surprised, having never actually spoken to an ape before.

But Kanzi was pointing to a box of candy that I was sitting near. That is the surprise that he wanted.

Moments like this are proof that these conversations help scientists learn about apes, from the apes themselves.

“If we have some common means of communicating with each other,” said Shumaker , ” we suddenly have exponentially large number of topics that we can explore.”

“It allows Kanzi to tell me if his stomach hurts, his head hurts or if he’d like to be alone or if he’s afraid or scared,” Fields added.

Speaking Up for Their Survival

There’s another possible impact of the communication with these apes: These celebrity apes may help raise awareness of the plight of apes in the wild.

Shumaker said there is an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 bonobos left in the wild, and 50 – 55,000 orangutans in the wild, so raising awareness of just how smart these creatures are might encourage the public to take their problems more seriously.

“The research we conduct here powerfully informs people about the nature of great ape intelligence,” Shumaker said. “We know that humans and great apes share far more than they differ. I think we have to recognize that. If that does not compel us to preserve great apes in the wild, I don’t know what can.”

The insight into ape learning might also give some insight into human development.

“It tells us about how we learn everything,” said Fields, “what the antecedents are to the kind of powerful learning that could occur in humans.”

Sometimes the similarities to humans are downright eerie. When I asked Kanzi if he wanted coffee, he enthusiastically shook his head up and down.

Bonobos share 98 percent of their DNA with humans — they also apparently share a love of decaf caramel machiatos.

For more information contact the www.greatapetrust.org.

Source: ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology/Story?id=3222942&page=1

Paris – Tree-dwelling apes may have been the first to begin walking on two legs, a new study by British researchers says, questioning the current theory that more recent human ancestors were the first bipeds.

The study, to be published on Friday in the US journal Science, says apes may have walked on two feet with support from their arms to traverse thin branches to collect food.

“If we’re right, it means you can’t rely on bipedalism to tell whether you’re looking at a human or other ape ancestor,” Robin Crompton of the University of Liverpool, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.

“It’s been getting more and more difficult for us to say what’s a human and what’s an ape, and our work makes that much more the case,” he said.

Crompton and colleagues Susannah Thorpe and Roger Holder of the University of Birmingham observed wild orangutans in Sumatra, Indonesia for their study. Thorpe spent a year living in the rainforest.

Looking at 3 000 examples of orangutan movement, the team found that they were more likely to walk upright, with the help of their arms, on thin branches. The orangutans tended to walk on all fours only on the largest branches, the researchers said.

They decided to observe orangutans because they spend their lives in trees and could serve as models for how human ancestors moved millions of years ago.

One of the most popular explanations for upright walking has been the so-called savannah hypothesis, which suggests ancestors to chimps, gorillas and humans descended from trees and began walking on all fours.

That type of walking would have eventually become the knuckle-walking that chimps and gorillas still use, followed by upright walking by humans, according to the hypothesis.

Previous research has said that apes would have begun encountering gaps between trees in eastern and central Africa toward the end of the Miocene era, which was 24 to five million years ago, as the climate alternated between wet and dry.

The British researchers suggest human ancestors then descended to the forest floor, finding food there and remaining bipedal. Ancestors of chimps and gorillas may have become good climbers, going up and down trees while using knuckle-walking when moving between trees on the ground, they say.

However, French anthropologist Yvette Deloison of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said the orangutan model was an incorrect one to use. Deloison had formulated a theory several years ago that the human form could have only derived from an ancestor that was already biped.

“If the ancestor of man had an anatomy allowing him to do the same thing as orangutans, with hands and feet so perfectly adapted to climbing and suspension, he would have been far too specialised to allow for the development of what we are today,” she told AFP.

Source: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=588&art_id=nw20070531090936133C203441

Biofuels is being touted as an oil alternative by some, but others believe it will destroy more than it saves.

It’s a rare event when the right of centre, pro-capitalist magazine The Economist finds itself in agreement with Fidel Castro. But when one of the last of the old-style communist dictators rose from his sick bed last month to write two scathing articles about the Bush administration’s enthusiastic embrace of biofuels, The Economist said it couldn’t agree more.

Biofuels – a category that encompasses fuels created from plants such as corn and sugar cane (ethanol), palm oil and other vegetable and animal oils – have been touted as a major panacea to the world’s reliance on the diminishing reserves of crude oil.

However, concerns over the consequences of diverting food crops for fuel, the energy required to create certain types of ethanol, and the destruction of forests and habitat for palm oil plantations, has many wondering whether they will do more damage than good.

The world’s largest producers have grouped together to create a sustainable business model, particularly regarding palm oil plantations, which are forecast to triple to 20 million hectares by 2010. Environmentalists want a moratorium while the technology, and the consequences, are refined and understood.

Castro’s outburst followed news that the US had mandated a target of 133 billion litres of biofuels by 2017, or nearly 10% of its total gasoline use – an initiative welcomed by farmers, oil companies and politicians. But Castro’s concern was that agricultural land will be used to feed cars rather than people.

In the US, subsidies would see farmers getting more money for fuel than food and rising prices for both corn and meat. In poorer countries, crops could be diverted to fuel cars in richer nations.

Meanwhile, in Malaysia and Indonesia, environmental groups fear oil-palm planting – to meet an expected huge demand from Europe – is running virtually unchecked, resulting in the cutting down of millions of hectares of forests, the release of hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from peat burning, and the threatened extinction of major wildlife species, including the orang-outang and the Sumatran tiger.

Oil palm is highly productive, yielding five tonnes of crude oil per hectare and generating internal rates of return of 26% per annum, according to several international studies, but it also generates significant waste products. Many plantations use petroleum-based pesticides and fertilisers that add further to greenhouse gas emissions, leading some groups to describe such biofuels as a disaster in the making.

While the US and the EU have set 10% targets for biofuels in cars, Australia has a far more modest target of 350 million litres by 2011, or less than 1% of total fuel and diesel use. Greenpeace and the Australian Conservation Foundation argue that firm controls have to be established before new targets are set.

“The biodiesel industry lacks a certification scheme to ensure that it does not present more problems than it causes,” says Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham. “We’ve got to make sure we don’t make a headlong rush into biofuels without being clear on what trying to achieve.”

The Australian biofuels industry is represented by a disparate group of entrepreneurs seeking to exploit opportunities offered by the use of sugar cane, corn, canola, soya, imported palm oil and other products such as tallow (animal fat from livestock industry) and used cooking oil as feedstocks.

According to Barry Murphy, who has been working to create a single industry body and will be the inaugural chairman of the Biofuels Association of Australia, the industry already has a capacity of some 400 million litres a year, but much of this is going untapped because of poor consumer demand.

Murphy, a former executive chairman of Caltex Australia, also chairs the company Natural Biofuels, which imports palm oil from Indonesia for its newly commissioned plant in Darwin. He says his company has joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a group established by WWF and comprising major multinationals, to address those concerns.

“We will not sanction the displacement of wildlife and native people,” he says. “There are always costs with these things, but we are trying to do this in the right way.”

Source: http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=261345

Great apes are facing an “inevitable crisis” arising from climate change, a leading conservationist has warned.

Dr Richard Leakey said that growing pressure to switch from fossil fuels to biofuels could result in further destruction of the animals’ habitats.

The chair of WildlifeDirect called for immediate action and proposed financial incentives to save forests from destruction as one possible solution.

He said: “Climate change will undoubtedly impact everything we know.”

The great apes – gorillas, chimps, bonobos and orangutans – are already under threat from habitat destruction, poaching, logging and disease.

The Great Apes Survival Project (Grasp), a United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) initiative, has warned that great apes are at risk of imminent extinction unless drastic action is taken.

Palm oils

In advance of a talk at the UK’s Royal Geographical Society, Dr Leakey told journalists that climate threats now had to be added to the mix.

The former director of the Kenyan Wildlife Service said: “I am concerned about the pressures on the land as a result of changes to the climate, but also the pressures on the land in terms of people’s reaction to climate change and the shift away from fossil fuels to biofuels.”

He said that “great swathes” of forest had already been destroyed in South Asia to make way for palm oil plantations, and this had had a dramatic impact on orangutans, which currently number 50,000.

Palm oil is used in vegetable oil, soaps, shampoos, industrial substances, but it has also been proposed as an alternative to fossil fuel.

Dr Leakey said the growing pressure to turn to biofuels such as palm oil could place the great apes’ habitat in further peril.

He added: “People shrug their shoulders and say what are poor countries to do if they cannot exploit their natural resources, and I can understand this, but it is not sustainable the way it is going.

There is also evidence that deforestation would further drive climate change itself by raising the amount of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Dr Leakey said.

New incentives

Dr Leakey suggested “biodiversity credits” could be a possible solution.

“Being paid for not cutting down indigenous forests and getting credit for that is a further step that builds on the idea of getting paid for planting new forests,” he explained.

“It does seem that we cannot stop development, but it does also seem that perhaps we can stop development where critical species are threatened, and perhaps there could be a price added to that.”

He said that there could be creative ways to solve the problems that climate change could bring, but added that it was crucial that action was taken now.

Dr Leakey told journalists: “Could the great apes go because of climate change? Yes. Possibly not within our lifetime, but what about in 100 or 200 years?

“Climate change is measurable and is happening at rate that is almost unprecedented from what we know in previous history, and the implications for biodiversity are there for all to see.”

Richard Leakey is a palaeo-anthropologist, responsible for extensive fossil finds related to human evolution, and renowned Kenyan conservationist. His parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, were prominent palaeontologists, finding and excavating key sites around Africa.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/6704549.stm

Published: 2007/05/30 15:03:08 GMT

Cameron Broadhurst, The Jakarta Post

Tanjung Puting, C. Kalimantan – On a raised platform, he sits aloof from the others, head of a forest dynasty, raising soft yellow fruit slowly to his mouth. Drinking from his urn, he glances around indifferently.

Gulombana is the ruler of a banana kingdom.

“When no other male can defeat him, he’s king,” said Camp Tanguey manager Pasatri. New one has to beat the old one.”

But no serious challenger has come forth, so at this camp in Central Kalimantan’s Tanjung Puting Park, Gulombana took center stage during the 9 a.m. breakfast feeding. Female, male and infant orangutans were forced wait their turn.

The orangutans here that have been released into the rainforest are not dependent on the offerings provided. Some days many will turn up to eat, other days only one or two. They now know how to find nourishment on their own in the jungle, a learning process Pasatri said often takes two years.

Yet the population here has grown from 20 to 30 during the 2003-2007 period, mostly from new babies born to female orangutans, who breed only once every eight years.

From high up in the trees mother and child Siswa and Suitop, descend gracefully to the ground and clamber onto the platform. Gulombana peers at them without great interest, but pulls a few bananas closer to himself.

Further up the river at Camp Leaky, the famed original research site of conservationist Dr. Birut Galdikas, the apes take their daily bananas at lunch.

Here, said camp worker JJ Munajad, three females are pregnant: Princess, April and Carey. And while their babies will be born at camp, other infants are brought in from captivity each year.

Since Leaky’s inception in 1971, over 200 of the great apes have passed through its care, with the current population of rehabilitating and released orangutans numbering around 100.

Sometimes they leave forever, disappearing off into the jungle. Other times they arrive from the wild to stay.

But while the animals may be safe or even increasing in population in and around the camps at Tanjung Puting, in other parts of the park they can still come under threat from fires and poachers. Even though the threat of illegal logging has largely been eradicated here, the park area itself lies within the boundaries of West Kotawaringen regency.

Under the local autonomy laws, JJ said a regency could decide to use the park for other purposes such as logging or palm plantations.

About 30 kilometers to the east of Central Kalimantan, near the provincial capital Palangkaraya, Nyaru Menteng houses the province’s other orangutan rehabilitation center.

Michael Sowards of U.S.-based The Orangutan Conservancy, which funds the work there, said that before an ape can be reintroduced to the wild, technicians and scientists monitor each orangutan closely to decide whether the animal is at ease climbing in trees and foraging for itself.

For those who come to know and love the great apes, their release is an emotional time.

“It’s pretty awesome to see them come out of the cage and climb around,” said Sowards.

Executive director of the Bornean Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS-Indonesia) Aldren Priyadjati agrees: “I see in their eyes, it’s quite amazing. They’re happy to be there.”

Yet no new releases have occurred in the last two years. BOS-Indonesia, which runs Nyaru Menteng, is surveying three possible areas: two in Berau and Beratus in East Kalimantan, and a site in Baktikop, north Central Kalimantan. Because the Bornean orangutans are divided into three subspecies, animals from the different areas cannot be mixed without polluting the gene pool.

With over 600 orangutans at Nyaru Menteng alone, space is tight and some are ready to leave.

A male orangutan, said Aldren, needs more than 1 square kilometer of ground for itself.

“Releasing (of orangutans) is not balancing the destruction of the forest,” he said. “Releasing and translocation are almost nothing compared to destruction.”

Because “normal” conditions are now difficult to find, orangutans are forced to live more closely together than may be comfortable.

In Baktikop, BOS-Indonesia is surveying an area of about 100,000 square hectares of forest as a possible release site. A small number of wild orangutans have already been translocated there. As the land is higher in elevation than the wetlands of Menteng, whether the new forest is suitable for the nourishment and shelter of rehabilitated animals will be determined later.

If it is, they will closely monitor the animals, something Aldren says is “a moral obligation” after the release itself.

But first, BOS-Indonesia needs a number of positive responses from the tangle of agencies concerned, including the local government and the Forestry Ministry.

In the meantime, the orangutans of Nyaru Menteng and East Kalimantan await a new wilderness – a new home.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/

Mon May 28, 2007 3:28AM EDT
Source: http://www.reuters.com/

(Reuters) – Asia’s only ape and the world’s largest arboreal mammal, shaggy red orangutans could be extinct in the wild in ten years the United Nations estimated this year.

Here are some facts on the vanishing “person of the forest”:

COMMON ANCESTORS:

– With 97 percent similar DNA, orangutans and humans are thought to have split from a common ancestor 18 million years ago. Chimpanzees, humankind’s closest relative with 99 percent similar DNA, diverted off around four million years ago.

– The oldest orangutan fossils were found in Africa and date from about 14 million years ago, although they have long disappeared from Africa. They are the only ape to have headed east to Asia.

AN HISTORICAL “INSULT”:

– Collectors and scientists brought the first orangutans to Europe in the eighteenth century. Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) classified humans and the three known great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas) as Primates in the 1760s, before the fourth ape, the Bonobo, joined the hominid family.

– Some regarded the classification as an insult to human dignity, as it dissolved the divide between man and beast.

THE UNIQUE ORANGUTAN:

– Unlike other apes, orangutans are semi-solitary, and spend 99 percent of their time in the trees. Sleeping high up in nests they build every night, they only go to the ground to forage.

– Females typically give birth once every eight years, and single motherhood is the norm — babies stay with mothers for six to seven years to learn forest skills. This is the longest time between births of any mammal, and the longest childhood dependence period of any animal.

– Indonesian lore relates the reclusive “person of the forest” or “orang hutan” can talk but chose not to, and descended from a red-haired man who fled to the forest to escape his debts.

THE FIRST APE TO VANISH?:

– The world’s 7,500 critically endangered Sumatran orangutan are likely to be one of the first of the great apes to vanish. Numbers fell by as much as a third after the 1997/1998 fires swept the island. Only the mountain gorilla has a smaller population, of approximately 700.

– There are approximately 38,000 central Bornean orangutans and 3,000 Northwest Bornean orangutans.

– Of the three other apes, there are 147,000-257,000 chimpanzees, 111,200 gorillas, and 10,000-50,000 bonobos living in the wild in Africa, the World Wide Fund for Nature estimates.

KEY THREATS:

– The United Nations cites rapid forest clearances for oil palm plantations as the greatest threat to the orangutan, over other threats like forest fires and illegal logging.

– Despite being legally protected since 1931, orangutans have been widely kept as pets in Indonesia and smuggled abroad. Their average price in Java is US$400, two to three times the original price paid to hunters in Kalimantan, the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC estimates.

Sources: Reuters, www.orangutan.com, The United Nations, The Last Stand of the Orangutan — State of emergency: illegal logging, fire and palm oil in Indonesia’s national parks, (www.grida.no/Products.aspx?m=23&amid=571), The World Wide Fund for Nature, Great Apes,

(www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/species/about_species/species_factsheets/great_apes/index.cfm) TRAFFIC, In Full Swing, An Aseesment of Trade in orang-utans and Gibbons on Java and Bali, Indonesia, (www.traffic.org/content/462.pdf)

A Message from BOS UK to the Indonesian and Malaysian Governments:
If Uganda can do this, why can’t Indonesia and Malaysia?

26 May 2007 10:46:49 GMT

By Tim Cocks

KAMPALA, May 26 – Uganda’s government has scrapped plans to convert thousands of hectares of rainforest on an island in Lake Victoria into a palm oil plantation, the environment minister said on Saturday.

President Yoweri Museveni has faced intense opposition, including violent protests, over proposals to give private firms the right to bulldoze protected forests to create farms.

The government said it could not license Kenyan company Bidco to plant palm in what is now a protected forest on Bugala island.

Days earlier, Uganda also suspended a separate proposal to give a chunk of mainland forest reserve to a sugar grower.

“They have got to look for alternative land,” Environment Minister Maria Mutagamba told Reuters.

Mutagamba said the National Forest Authority had blocked the license.

Former NFA boss Olav Bjella quit last year over the issue, after coming under government pressure.

In April, three people were killed in a protest against government plans to give 7,100 hectares of Mabira Forest, a nature reserve since 1932, to Mehta, a private a sugar producer.

Like Mabira, Bugala island is home to rare species of plants, monkeys and birds that conservationists say are of high value. …

Bidco has already planted 4,000 hectares on Bugala, mostly on land from which non-protected rainforest was bulldozed, but it needs 2,500 hectares more.

A private letter from Mutagamba to the cabinet in January shows Bidco was concerned the project would “jeopardise the loans they were processing with … financing agencies due to … negative publicity.”

Palm oil crops have been hailed as a new biofuel to help trim the world’s dependence on fossil fuels and fight carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

But environmental groups say big palm producers such as Malaysia and Indonesia are clearing millions of hectares of carbon-storing rainforest to make way for their plantations.

http://dearkitty.blogsome.com/2007/05/26/uganda-scraps-plan-to-cut-rainforest-for-palm-oil/