West Kalimantan orangutans in great danger

KETAPANG, West Kalimantan (JP): When you are in the area of Gunung Palung National Park, you must be impressed by the presence of its orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), billed as the world's largest and healthiest.

Orangutans -- found only in Sumatra and Kalimantan -- numbered between 20,000 and 25,000 according to 1993 data. In Borneo, in both Indonesian and Malaysian, the population of orangutans is recorded at 10,282 to 15,546. In Gunung Palung National Park there are about 2,000 of them.

In the past two decades the world's orangutan population has declined by some 80 percent. In the past decade alone in Kalimantan, between 30 percent - 50 percent of the orangutans have been killed, leaving only 5,141 to 7,773 remaining.

Depending on the natural condition, the population of orangutans is generally one to three per square kilometer. As more forest areas have been cleared, the population density has become higher because they usually group together to forage for food. Just like human beings, orangutans can suffer diseases such as malaria and colic.

An orangutan can weigh up to 100 kg. It is generally 10 times stronger than an average human being. A female orangutan begins to have their babies at age 11 to 15 years while males are sexually mature for reproduction at age 10 to 20 years.

A female orangutan is pregnant for 9 months and breast-feeds its young for five to six years. She also looks after her young for two to three more years. She will mate again eight years after giving birth and then the reproduction cycle begins all over again.

An orangutan can live up to 45 years. Therefore, a female orangutan can give birth to a maximum of four babies. According to research, the mortality rate of baby orangutans stands at 10 percent. If you wish to get a baby orangutan, you must first kill the mother. You can imagine then the speed at which the population of orangutans will be reduced if about 10 mother orangutans are killed every year.

Orangutans live on low-lying land of a river basin and in the foothills (like Gunung Palung National Park). The distribution of orangutans in the habitant is very much dependent on the availability of food.

Orangutans feed on a variety of forest fruits. When fruits are not available, they will be content with leaves, edible topmost and innermost palm fronds, the bark of certain trees and insects. A six-year research conducted by Harvard University at Gunung Palung National Park comes up with some 300 kinds of food for orangutans.

During the fruit season, orangutans will gain weight, a condition enabling them to survive when fruits are scarce and they have to feed on bark, leaves and flowers. In the peak of the fruit season, social interaction and mating also increase in frequency. When fruit supplies become scarce, they use up their fat and lose weight.

Then, the orangutans must walk longer distances in search of food. The orangutans in Gunung Palung National Park must go through swampy forests, walk across lowlands and a mountain chain just to find trees with fruit.

Hunting

Today the orangutans in Gunung Palung are greatly threatened by the loss of their habitat and hunting. If allowed to go on unchecked, rampant lumber theft, opening up of land for non- irrigated farming and forest fires will lead led to the gradual disappearance of the habitat of orangutans.

Once they lose their habitat, orangutans will become extinct because of starvation.

According to Elizabeth Yaap, head of the Orangutan Research Project of Harvard University in Gunung Palung National Park, rehabilitation is not good for the conservation of orangutans because when they are raised by people they will not return to their original and natural habitat.

They will instead return to their rehabilitation center because they have mingled with human beings. Besides, orangutans raised in the rehabilitation center must not be released into the wild where there are already other orangutans, said Elizabeth, former orangutan researcher at Tanjung Puting, Central Kalimantan.

"If this happens, there will be food scarcity and the orangutans will die," she noted.

According to her, the best way to conserve orangutans is to conserve nature, their original home. Orangutans will multiply if its natural home is in good condition and its food is sufficient.

The people living around Gunung Palung have often posed these questions: "What's the use of spending millions of U.S. dollars on orangutans while the people in the surrounding areas are still poor? Why don't you allocate the funds to improve the welfare of the people living around the area?"

According to Elizabeth, orangutans are considered an umbrella species, the main animal in the life cycle of creatures in the tropical rain forest.

"If orangutans are extinct, there will be imbalance in the ecosystem in a tropical rain forest," she said.

Orangutans are main seed-spreading animals. As they look for food covering a distance in the radius of 30 km, they spread the seeds of particular endemic plants in a tropical rain forest area. So, protecting orangutans actually means protecting other species.

Ary S Sugandhi, an orangutan researcher from Conservation International Indonesia, says orangutans are yet to be managed in accordance with their economic value.

In fact, he says, in a national park in Costa Rica, for example, a few gorillas can bring in US$598,000 a year to the country's tourism sector. In this respect, Ir Lestari, an officer of Gunung Palung National Park, has admitted that the national park is yet to be professionally managed.

To save orangutans, researchers have recommended that the law must be more firmly enforced and heavier penalties exacted on those involved in orangutan hunting and trading.

Research

The orangutan research station in Gunung Palung is located at Gunung Panti. It was Cheryl Knott of Harvard University who initiated this research in 1994. Other researchers after Knott include Elizabeth Yaap and Andrea Johnson.

According to Yaap, the orangutan research in Gunung Palung is concerned not only with the behavior, reproduction and physiological aspect of orangutans but also with efforts to conserve and rehabilitate them.

The Indonesian government has made use of the results of orangutan researches undertaken under this project for its 1999 Orangutan Action Plan, a national strategy devised to protect this animal against the threat of extinction.

In orangutan research, the researcher must keep tabs on the animal from the time it awakes until the time it goes to sleep in order to observe its behavior; what it eats and how much of the food it eats; the distance it covers as well as its routes and how it interacts with other orangutans. Besides all this, an orangutan's urine and feces will also be collected to find out its hormones and parasites.

The researchers form Harvard University regularly invite students and local people to visit the research station.

"It is expected that in this way the local people will be aware of the need to conserve this national park and the orangutans in it," said Johnson.

The presence of orangutans in Gunung Palung is also beneficial because it has reduced the frequency of timber and animal theft in the forest as the thieves are afraid of being reported to the authorities by those conducting research on the animal.

In Kalimantan orangutan researches are conducted at five sites: Gunung Panti Research Station in Gunung Palung National Park (Ketapang, West kalimantan), River Sekonyer in Tanjung Puting National Park (Central Kalimantan), Orangutan Reintroduction Station in Semboja Forest Research Center (East Kalimantan), Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center (Sabah, Malaysia), Bako Wildlife Sanctuary (Sarawak, Malaysia).

If you are interested to know more about orangutans in Gunung Palung National Park you may contact the following: (1) National Park Unit - Ketapang, Jl. KH Wahid Hasyim No. 41 A PO Box 141 Ketapang 78801 Tel/Fax No. (0534) 33539, (2) Elizabeth Yaap or Andrea Johnson - Orangutan Project Harvard University, PO Box 162, Ketapang 78801, Fax 0534-32740 E-mail: yaap@usa.net, (3) Dr Cheryl Knott, Vice Director of Orangutan Project, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 Fax: 0011-617-496-8041 e-mail: knott@fas.harvard.edu.

-- Edi Petebang