Orangutan Outreach Website - Saving the Orangutan

Posted at 3:22 pm June 4, 2007 by Kim Livingstone
Source: San Diego Zoo blog

We are very fortunate at the San Diego Zoo to have the ability to exhibit siamangs and orangutans together in a state-of-the-art exhibit called Absolutely Apes. The animals have plenty of room to swing, brachiate, climb, lounge, and explore on a daily basis. Within this group of animals are two older female orangutans named Josephine and Janey. Janey is a Bornean orangutan who is 45 years old and Josephine is a 47-year-old Sumatran orangutan. They are both very significant because they are 2 of the 10 oldest orangutans in North American zoos. One of the oldest orangutans is a 53-year-old female who lives at Miami Metrozoo.

At Josephine’s last medical check up in January 2007, it was determined that she was experiencing heart disease. Fluid had built up around her heart and needed to be drained. A team of doctors and veterinarians performed the procedure and Josephine was back to her old self in a short period of time. Recently, however, the keepers noticed that she was showing signs of lethargy. Her respiration had increased and her appetite was poor. These were all symptoms of her heart disease. Our veterinarians responded quickly by prescribing medications to manage her symptoms and by scheduling her for cardiac surgery to be performed here at the San Diego Zoo.

On Friday May 25, doctors from University of California, San Diego performed a quick surgery that created a window in her diaphragm that will allow pericardial fluid to drain into her abdominal cavity. Transesophageal ultrasound imaging performed during the procedure revealed poor cardiac function indicative of heart failure. Josephine recovered quickly from her surgery and was able to rest inside the orangutan bedrooms on Saturday. Her appetite increased and her respirations were back to normal. By Sunday, May 27, Josephine was ready to go outside into her habitat and be reunited with her orangutan family. Her 3-year old grandson, Cinta, was the first to greet his grandmother. As soon as Cinta laid eyes on her he slid down the climbing structure from high above and raced across the grass to grab onto Josie’s leg and give her a big Cinta hug. He had clearly missed her! One by one, all of the other orangutans, Janey, Karen, Satu, Clyde, and Indah, all came over to greet her.

Today, Josephine has a glimmer in her eyes and more spunk in her step. She appears to be feeling much better and is happy to be back with her orangutan and siamang friends. The keepers and veterinarians will continue to closely monitor Josephine and manage her heart condition with medication. Every effort is put forth daily to make sure that animals like Josephine are comfortable and living a quality life here at the San Diego Zoo.

Kim Livingstone is the Heart of the Zoo team area lead at the San Diego Zoo.

Quantum Shift

http://www.quantumshift.tv/v/1178084064/

The orangutan is on the verge of extinction due to poaching and habitat loss. Now deep in the heart of Borneo orangutans and Dayaks, the local aboriginal people, have come together in a unique program. Dayak women have become surrogate mothers to hundreds of orphaned orangutans.

This is a story of sacrifice and salvation, tragedy and hope as mothers from simple backgrounds join together with international scientists to save the vanishing orangutan.

Running time 3:30 minutes

June 5, 2007

The palm oil industry is bad news for these apes, writes Julian Lee.

Twenty years ago the words “dolphin safe” changed the way we thought about tuna. Now environmentalists are hoping one of man’s closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the orang-utan, will do the same for a widely used but hidden commodity - palm oil.

Rising demand for the highly versatile oil in products such as biscuits, potato chips and soap, and now as a biofuel, has led to a rush to establish oil palm plantations.

The forests that are home to the orang-utan are disappearing at the equivalent of 300 football fields an hour, pushing the already endangered species to the brink and into conflict with the people whose livelihood depends on the oil-bearing fruit.

The burning fires from the land cleared for plantations is responsible for roughly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations says.

The irony that palm oil is regarded as an eco-friendly alternative to crude oil is not lost on the coalition of environmental groups that is running a campaign to raise awareness of the problems of palm oil production.

Ange Palmer, of the Palm Oil Action Group, says the campaign is not calling for a boycott but wants oil to be produced by plantations that do not encroach further into forests that are home to orang-utans and other endangered species, such as the Sumatran tiger and Asian elephant.

“We want to send the message to Australian companies that it is unacceptable for them to import palm oil unless it’s from a sustainable source,” she says.

“We would like companies to acknowledge this as an issue, outline publicly their position [and] say what they are going to do about it,” says Palmer, whose organisation represents the Australian Orang-utan Project, the Rainforest Information Centre, Friends of the Earth and the Borneo Orang-utan Society.

Companies such as Goodman Fielder account for 70 per cent of all palm oil imported from Malaysia. The company refines it and sells it to companies such as Arnott’s and Smith’s to use in their products. About 200 million litres will be used in biodiesels in Australia this year.

But the clock is ticking. A United Nations report, The Last Stand of the Orang-utan, estimates that 98 per cent of forests in Malaysia and Indonesia could be gone by 2020. Indonesia plans to double the 6.5 million hectares under plantation in the next five years, and Europe’s goal to cut greenhouse emissions by 20 per cent partly by relying on cars using biofuels, could deliver the final blow.

Leif Cocks, a conservation biologist and the president of the Australian Orang-utan Project, is pessimistic about the orang-utan’s future. There are about 7300 apes left in Sumatra, putting the species on the World Conservation Union’s list of critically endangered animals. About 50,000 orang-utans survive on Borneo.

Once the land - and their habitat - is cleared, the apes are left with little food, forcing them to eat the oil palm shoots and putting them in direct conflict with the plantation owners. Five thousand orang-utans are killed a year, most often by plantation workers eager for a $20 bounty placed on them by the plantation owners.

“The apes and the plantation owners are competing for the same bit of land, the flat fertile plains,” Cocks says. “Most national parks are of little value economically as they are in highland areas. The areas that are of most value to man are also the greatest value to the apes.”

Environmentalists and about half the palm oil industry are pinning their hopes on a scheme that will see their oil, or the products made from it, labelled as having come from a sustainable source. More than 140 plantation owners, producers, manufacturers - among them Goodman Fielder, retailers and non-government organisations have joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. Members promise to not clear valuable forests for new plantations, to respect the rights of indigenous land owners and to put in place measures such as nature strips or corridors which wildlife can use to pass through their plantations.

Yet the verification process is still being finalised, which is delaying the availability of certified ethical palm oil products and fuels.

Julian Lee is a Herald journalist. His book about ethical living will be published by Random House in February next year.

Source:
http://www.smh.com.au/

By Mita Valina Liem
June 4, 2007

JAKARTA (Reuters) - It’s one of the few countries that still has vast swathes of tropical rainforests left.

But conservationists say maybe not for long.

Indonesia’s rainforests — especially those on Borneo island — are being stripped so rapidly because of illegal logging and palm oil plantations for bio-fuels, they could be wiped out altogether within the next 15 years, some environmentalists say.

“Sixty percent of the protected and conservation areas are already badly damaged due to illegal logging and palm oil plantations,” Rully Sumada, a forestry expert with Indonesian environmental group Walhi, told Reuters.

“The deforestation speed is 2.8 million hectares a year. At this rate, by 2012 the forests in Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi will be gone, only the forests in Papua will be left. And if cutting of trees carries on, no forest will be left by 2022.”

Indonesia has a total forest area of more than 225 million acres, or about 10 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forest, according to Rainforestweb.org, a portal on rainforests (www.rainforestweb.org).

But the tropical Southeast Asian country — whose forests are a treasure trove of plant and animal species including the endangered orang-utans — has already lost an estimated 72 percent of its original frontier forest.

The biggest threat to the forests of Borneo, and also Aceh on the northernmost tip of Sumatra island, is from illegal logging.

A recent report by the Environmental Investigation Agency and Indonesia-based Telapak said that Malaysia and China were major recipients of stolen Indonesian timber and that shipping companies from Singapore carried such wood overseas.

CHINA INDUSTRY COMPLICIT

Greenpeace’s China office said China’s timber industry was complicit in the illegal felling of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea’s merbau trees, with logs then smuggled to China and processed and exported as floorboards and high-end furnishings to the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.

Merbau is a resilient red hardwood, one of the most valuable in Southeast Asia.

China’s Foreign Ministry brushed away accusations that the country’s demand for timber was hastening the destruction of Southeast Asian forests, saying it had a strict system of supervision and management of timber and timber product imports.”

“The effects of deforestation are crystal clear. Bio-diversity will be destroyed,” Masnellyarti Hilman, a deputy minister in Indonesia’s environment ministry, told Reuters.

“Not to mention floods, landslides. We see them as a result of massive deforestation by people who do not care about its impact. Although they actually know that one of the conditions to fulfill before cutting trees down is to re-plant, some do, some don’t.”

ORANGUTANS IN PERIL

Environmentalists say Indonesia has also lost vast amounts of forest land to feed growing global demand for bio-fuels as an alternative source of energy.

The world’s second largest palm oil producer already has around 5 million hectares of land planted with oil palm and the government aims to develop between 2-3 million hectares more of oil plantations nationwide by 2010.

Environmentalists say the slash-and-burn technique used to speed up the clearing of land for plantations sends huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and is also destroying several endangered species such as the orang-utan and the Sumatran tiger.

According to a recent U.N report compiled using new satellite images and Indonesian government data, orang-utan habitat is being lost 30 percent quicker than was previously feared.

It was estimated in 2002 about 60,000 of the shaggy ginger primates were left in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. Some ecologists say the number has now been halved and others say the species could be extinct in 20 years.

Indonesia says government policy is to preserve virgin forest and expand palm plantations on degraded and abandoned land that has already been cleared.

Indonesia’s government has deployed the military on at least three occasions in recent years to confiscate timber and chase loggers out of its parks — and has begun training quick response ranger teams to police protected areas.

But experts say the new units remain crippled by a lack of funds, vehicles, weapons and equipment, and face a huge threat from ruthless loggers.

“We allow people to open palm oil plantations as long as they replant. Palm oil plantations open a wide range of jobs but they must not do that in conservation areas,” Hilman said.

The palm oil industry defends itself and its methods.

“If there are some endangered species in the area or an area is of high conservation value, then it will not be opened for plantations,” Derom Bangun, executive chairman of the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association, told Reuters.

“The government has classified areas and has rules and we obey them. It is not what people from outside think that we just come, clear land and burn.”

Source: http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/swissinfo.html?siteSect=105&sid=7889251