ST. PAUL — Jaya is the new name of a baby orangutan at Como Zoo in St. Paul. Jaya is an Indonesian name meaning celebration and victorious.

The name Jaya was selected over Bejo and Pandu. Since January, guests were able to vote for the orangutans name with a donation to the zoo. All the donations from the voting process will go toward Como’s orangutan training program.

Jaya, a male Sumatran orangutan, was born via cesarean section in December, The c-section was a medical first for the zoo, merging the skills of Como Zoo’s zookeepers and veterinarians from University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine, along with medical staff from University of Minnesota Children’s Hospital, Fairview including two OB-GYN physicians.

There have only been 9 c-section births in over 1,600 orangutan births documented in zoos, including this one.

Jaya’s parents are Markisa, a 20-year-old female orangutan, and Jambu Aye, a 22 year-old-male. Jaya is the 14th orangutan born at Como since exhibiting orangutans in 1959.

Source: http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/

IJM Plantations Bhd (IJMP) has transformed into one of the fastest growing oil palm plantation companies in Malaysia with strategic oil palm-related investments in Indonesia and India. Within a short span of two years, the group doubled its plantation hectarage to about 60,000ha and will be on the lookout for suitable land bank for oil palm cultivation, particularly in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Velayuthan Tan: Managing director and chief executive officer

Do you think this guy cares at all that his company is destroying the rainforest and killing orangutans so consumers can have cheap shampoo? I doubt it. How do you suppose he would feel if someone bulldozed his house and burned it down with him in it? His road to fortune is smeared with orangutan blood…..

PASER, East Kalimantan: Police arrested Wednesday an Indonesian citizen and confiscated 720 cubic meters of illegal logs allegedly stolen from rainforest in Paser regency.

The man identified as JD was detained and the logs and three ships used to transport the logs were seized as material evidence for further investigations.

East Kalimantan Police water police chief Sr. Comr. Harris Fadillah said the arrest was made on the Kerang River on a routine patrol of the regency.

“The logs and the ships were confiscated because they had no necessary documents from local forestry and transportation authorities, ” he said.

Over the last two weeks, the military confiscated more than 32,000 logs allegedly stolen from rainforests in West Kalimantan.

Illegal logging is still common in Kalimantan, despite tough laws and increased surveillance from security authorities. –JP

Source: The Jakarta Post

By Mohammad Shahidul Islam

Primates are considered closest living relatives of mankind. These living relatives-apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates-are becoming rarer from the tropical forest. “Reasons for the decline are no mystery: they all relate directly or indirectly to human actions” says a Worldwatch Institute report. A survey, worked out by 60 experts from 21 countries, cautions that failure to respond to the mounting threats has now been worsened by climate change. On the whole, 114 of the world’s 394 primate species are categorised as threatened with disappearance on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list. Illegal wildlife trade and commercial plant-meat poaching have been largely blamed for their disappearance.

The primate-mongers brutally kill primates for food and to vend the meat. They encage them for live business; and farmers, loggers and land promoters destroy their habitat. One species, Miss Waldron’s red colobus of Ivory Coast and Ghana, already is feared extinct, while the golden-headed langur of Vietnam and China’s Hainan gibbon number only in the dozens.

The Horton Plains slender loris of Sri Lanka has been sighted just four times since 1937.

“You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium; that’s how few of them remain on Earth today,” said Conservation International President Russell A. Mittermeier, who also chairs the IUCN/Species Survival Commission (SSC) Primate Specialist Group.

“The situation is worst in Asia, where tropical forest destruction and the hunting and trading of monkeys put many species at terrible risk. Even newly discovered species are severely threatened from loss of habitat and could soon disappear.”

“By protecting the world’s remaining tropical forests,” Mittermeier says, “we can save primates and other endangered species while helping prevent climate change.”

The 21st Congress of the International Primatological Society in Entebbe, Uganda has published an alarming report that enlists the world’s 25 most endangered primates.

Eight of the primates on the latest list, including the Sumatran orangutan of Indonesia and the Cross River gorilla of Cameroon and Nigeria, are “four-time losers” that also appeared on the previous three lists. Six other species are on the list for the first time, including a recently discovered Indonesian tarsier that has yet to be formally named.

Madagascar and Vietnam each have four primates on the new list, while Indonesia has three, followed by Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Colombia with two each, and one each from China, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador. Some primates on the list are found in more than one country.

By region, the list includes 11 species from Asia, seven from Africa, four from Madagascar, and three from South America, showing that non-human primates are threatened wherever they live.

All 25 primates on the 2006-2008 list are found in the world’s biodiversity hotspots–34 high priority regions identified by Conservation International that cover just 2.3 percent of the Earth’s land surface but harbour well over 50 percent of all terrestrial plant and animal diversity.

Eight of the hotspots are considered the highest priorities for the survival of the most endangered primates: Indo-Burma, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands, Sundaland, Eastern Afromontane, Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa, Guinean Forests of West Africa, the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, and Western Ghats-Sri Lanka.

A journal states, the clearing of tropical forests for agriculture, logging, and the collection of fuel wood continue to be key factors in marauding the primates.

Tropical deforestation also emits 20 percent of total greenhouse gases that cause climate change, which is more than the carbon discharge of all the world’s cars, trucks, trains and airplanes combined.

In addition, climate change is altering the habitats of many species, leaving those with small ranges even more vulnerable to extinction. Hunting for subsistence and commercial purposes is another major threat to primates, especially in Africa and Asia. Live capture for the pet trade also poses a serious threat, particularly to Asian species.

The list focuses on the severity of the overall threat rather than mere numbers. Some on the list, such as the Sumatran orangutan, still number in the low thousands but are disappearing at a faster rate than other primates. Others were discovered only in recent years, and their low numbers and limited range make them particularly vulnerable to habitat destruction and other threats.

These genuses are our closest living family members. Non-human primates are indispensable to keep up our eco-system’s energy. Through scattering seeds and other interactions with their environments, primates facilitate to sustain a wide range of plant and animal life that rebuild the Earth’s forests.

Conservation of non-human primates is a critical issue facing primatologists today. By protecting the world’s remaining tropical forests, we should save primates and other endangered species for our easy breathe. We have to check strictly the factors that lead to primate related business or its annihilation.

(Mohammad Shahidul Islam is a faculty member of National Hotel and Tourism Training Institute. )

Source: http://nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2008/02/18/news0927.htm

Jambi (ANTARA News) - Six Sumatra orang-utans (Pongo pigmaeus abelii) from the Sumatra Orang-Utan Quarantine Center in Batu Mbelin Village, Sibolangit Subdistrict, Deli Serdang, North Sumatra province, were scheduled to arrive at Bukit Tiga Puluh National Park (TNBT) in Tebo Regency, Jambi, on February 19, 2008.

They are leaving North Sumatra for their destination by land on February 18, 2008, and were slated to arrive in Tebo regency on the following day, Head of the Jambi Province Natural Reserve Conservation Institute (BKSDA) Agung Setyabudi said in Jambi on Sunday.

The government has turned the Jambi-Riau TNBT into a protection and breeding ground of the Sumatra orang-utan.

Previously the six orang-utans were quarantined for 20 months at the Sumatra Orang-Utan Quarantine Center of the North Sumatra Lestari Ecosystem Foundation (YEL).

The six big apes as confiscated objects of the Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD) Natural Reserve Conservation Agency (BKSDA) are called Ahmad (13), Mopi and Deknong (8), Cut and Yanti (6), and Anjeli (5).

The six orang-utans will bring the total number of orang-utans set free into the Bukit Tiga Puluh National Park to 100.

It was estimated that only 6,500 Sumatra orang-utans still survived today and are living in the Leuser exosystem area and in the Batangtoru protected forests in North Sumatra. (*)

Source: http://www.antara.co.id/en/

A male baby orangutan was born at Como Park Zoo in mid-December. He was delivered via c-section successfully, which was a first for the historic St. Paul zoo.

The baby orangutan was in critical condition the first few hours after delivery and the mother was left to recuperate. Over the next 11 days, the staff and zoo keepers spent 24 hours a day holding the baby while wearing an orange furry vest, which allowed the baby orangutan to cling to the keeper as he would cling to his own mother. To the best of their abilities, special care was taken to ensure he developed his natural orangutan instincts to help him with his reintroduction back to mom.

Because of the furry vest, Mom and baby have been doing just fine. They are currently off exhibit to give them time to bond and be closely monitored. They will be spending limited time in the public exhibit space over the next several weeks.

Currently, Como Zoo is allowing people to vote to name the new baby.

Guests can vote online here or in Como’s Visitor Center.

Source: http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=498564

Feb 14, 2008
By Paul Taylor

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Prince Charles called on Thursday for a global fund to preserve tropical rainforests from destruction.

“In the simplest of terms, we have to find a way to make the forests worth more alive than dead,” Prince Charles told the European Parliament in an address.

“The doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight”, he said.

He called for a public-private partnership of banks, insurance companies and pension funds alongside international financial institutions to provide financial incentives to combat deforestation taking place on a massive scale.

Prince Charles said the burning of rainforests, which he called “the planet’s air-conditioning system”, was responsible for a big proportion of greenhouse gases, blamed for global warming as well as the loss of water and plant life.

Every year, 20 million hectares of forest, equivalent to the area of England, Wales and Scotland, was destroyed, he said.

He said he was encouraged some business chiefs and public opinion were now willing to consider more radical action and lifestyle changes than governments dared to propose.

In a resolutely pro-European speech, he praised last month’s European Commission proposals to cut greenhouse gas emissions and promote renewable energy and biofuels, and said governments were still not moving fast enough to meet the challenge.

The fight against climate change was “clearly comparable to war. The question is whether we have the courage to wage it”, he declared.

Prince Charles, accompanied by business leaders and members of his other charities, met Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and the EU’s environment, energy, trade and agriculture commissioners to discuss climate change on Wednesday.

He suggested in his speech that proceeds from the planned auctioning of emissions permits under the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme could be used to provide long-term incentives for sustainable forestry in developing countries.

The Commission proposed last month that carbon dioxide emissions allowances should be auctioned from 2013 instead of being handed out for free to power generators and industries, with all such permits to be auctioned by 2020.

However, the revenue would accrue to EU member states and Brussels has only an advisory say in how it is spent.

Environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth praised the prince’s proposal that countries should be paid to protect forests and his call for immediate political action.

Friends of the Earth spokesman Tony Juniper urged the British government to “raise its game” by strengthening its proposed climate change legislation to achieve deeper cuts in carbon dioxide gas emissions.

Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKMOL46544720080214

On February 13 a female Bornean Orangutan named “Yuki” (approximately 38 years old, wild caught) was moved to the Tama Zoo, Tokyo from the Fukuoka Zoo, Kyushu.

Visit the Tama Zoo website.

This post was taken from the blog of Ensembl, a joint project between EMBL - EBI and the Sanger Institute to develop a software system which produces and maintains automatic annotation on selected eukaryotic genomes.

Ensembl 49 will contain good news on the comparative genomics side. Apart from the new whole-genome multiple alignments for which we can now handle segmental duplications and infer ancestral sequences, two new species will be available, namely horse and orangutan.

We are especially excited about the new orangutan genome as it is a key species in the primate lineage, in between the human, chimp and gorilla group and the Old World monkeys. Its inclusion in our gene trees will result in a better resolution of the phylogeny of the primate genes.

Source: http://ensembl.blogspot.com/

By BRYAN WALSH
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008

Copyright: Thomas Breuer - WCS/MPI-EVA

Leah was staring at George. A series of rapid, pulsating whimpers escaped her lips. She then drew near to George, who locked gazes with her, his face unreadable. His shoulders were relaxed, and when Leah was within his grasp he opened his right arm and embraced her. Leah lay on the ground and George looked into her eyes. He bent over to lie on her, while Leah wrapped her legs around George’s waist…

Is this a missing letter from the Penthouse Forum? The steamy section of a well-thumbed romance novel? Try neither: The scene is actually taken from the April 2007 issue of the Gorilla Gazette, a primatology journal. Leah and George aren’t star-crossed lovers caught in mid-tryst. They’re western gorillas in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, observed by primatologists whose interest is far more scientific than it is prurient. There’s reason to watch — Leah and George’s moment in the Mbeli Bai forest clearing, captured on film by a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, is one of the only times gorillas have been seen mating face to face, rather than face to back. “It’s an extremely rare behavior,” says Thomas Breuer, the primatologist who photographed the pair through a telelens. “We haven’t seen this in 13 years of observation. If you look a the photos it’s a very nice piece of action.”

I have, and it is. But what does the act mean? Is it a one-off, or the start of a gorilla sexual revolution? Breuer is hesitant to draw any conclusions, noting that scientists observe just a sliver of the life of wild gorillas, but he speculates that face-to-face mating (also known as “ventro-ventral copulation,” for the Latinists out there) might engender a deeper relationship between the silverback male, George, and Leah, the female. After the mating was finished (roughly 2 mins., about par for the course for your average silverback), Breuer even observed George holding Leah’s hand. Apparently, even the world’s largest primates like the occasional cuddle. “Maybe there’s a way the act forms a kind of bond between the silverback and the female,” he says. “But we just don’t know.”

That might be unlikely — male gorillas, after all, are happily polyandrous, mating with multiple females in their group. (It’s good to be the silverback.) But there might just be something special about Leah. Breuer had earlier observed Leah (named inexactly after Princess Leia of Star Wars) using a crude tool — another first — testing out the depth of a pond with a long stick, rather than simply diving in. The very humanness of her experimentation struck him. “That observation was so interesting,” says Breuer. “Very often they find solutions to problems in the same way as you or I would.”

Perhaps that’s why we find such stories so fascinating. More than just our neighbors on the evolutionary tree, primates are our doubles in the animal world. We look into our eyes and we see ourselves, and even experienced scientists who’ve spent years observing them struggle to avoid falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. It would be nice to believe, on a Valentine’s Day, that when George and Leah lock eyes, they know a little bit of what we might feel when we look upon our loved one. And perhaps they do. But they don’t need to. The life of a wild gorilla, caught only in glimpses from a distance, has richness and mystery that is wholly sufficient to itself, and which we’ll never fully know.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1713215,00.html?cnn=yes