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 ForestFocus on Indonesia: Page 9 Orangutans once ranged in mainland southeast Asia as well as Indonesia, but hunting and forest cutting eliminated them from 98 percent of their original territory, leaving populations only on Sumatra and Borneo. These islands were home to tens of thousands of Orangutans at the turn of the century, but since then, these intelligent apes have been pushed into pockets of shrinking rainforest. Orangutans are unable to adjust to second-growth forest and depend on very large ranges within primary rainforest, where they feed on ripe fruit and flowers. Their populations have become scattered from loss of old-growth forest, and even national parks are no longer safe havens for them, as poaching and illegal logging increased in the late 1990s. Orangutan populations decline between 60 percent and 95 percent in selectively logged forests (Newman et al. 2000). The logging scares them out of their territories, and they often die of starvation or accidents (Newman et al. 2000).
One of their former strongholds was the Tanjung Puting National Park, 741,000 acres on a peninsula on the south coast of Borneo. It was upgraded to national park status in 1982, primarily to protect the Orangutan. This is the largest swamp forest in southeast Asia, with a mosaic of habitats, including primary rainforests. The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) of London conducted an in-depth study of illegal logging in this park, publishing a report, The Final Cut, in 1999 (Newman et al. 1999). Illegal loggers were so blatant that they built a wooden railway to slide out the giant logs. When government officials were notified, they did nothing, as they had apparently been corrupted by bribes from the loggers (Newman et al. 1999). In December 1999, biologists in the park found themselves ordered by armed loggers to leave. Similar illegal logging took place in other parks and reserves crucial to the survival of the Orangutan, leaving few areas not seriously degraded (Newman et al. 1999). EIA turned over to Indonesian government authorities, including the Governor of the Province, copies of its detailed report on illegal logging, which had uncovered the fact that 70 percent of the timber being processed in Indonesia came from illegal logging (Newman et al. 2000).
The World Bank in Jakarta estimated that between 1985 and 1997, Indonesia lost an average of 1.5 million hectares of forest cover every year, with dry tropical forest, an endangered ecosystem, suffering the greatest losses. Sulawesi has been logged out, and this forest type could disappear from Sumatra and Kalimantan in the near future (Newman et al. 2000). Logging supplies 2 million cubic meters of timber to its many pulp mills (Mittermeier et al. 1999a). The lack of strong government control has allowed corrupt timber barons to emerge and control the rampant illegal logging that is leaving little of the country untouched (Newman et al. 2000). In spite of international publicity about this disastrous state of affairs, and pressure from international donor agencies, the Indonesian Government stated that it would stop the illegal logging, but did not take action. The bribery scandal apparently reaches into high levels within the government (Newman et al. 2000). In May 2000, student activists, frustrated by the government complicity in the looting of their national heritage, held four government officials at a port in West Kalimantan after Customs and other officials failed to halt the shipment of an illegal consignment of timber to Singapore. This shipment, with 70 containers of logs, was forced to return to port and its cargo seized (Newman et al. 2000). China and the European Union import more than half the timber exported from Indonesia, and to date, no action has taken place by importing countries to confiscate illegal shipments of timber (Newman et al. 2000).
The status of Orangutans has gone from endangered to critical. Decades of logging, clearing and forest fires have destroyed the majority of their primary, old-growth forests on Borneo and Sumatra. Thousands were killed during these fires and hundreds that fled burning forests and entered open areas near villages were killed by villagers wielding machetes. Mothers were hacked to death to obtain their babies, who were often wounded in the process. Hundreds of orphaned Orangutans, pitiful, sickly and malnourished, were confiscated during this period and placed in rehabilitation centers. Many died, and the traumatized survivors clung to one another in crowded pens and crates, mass fed by volunteers and workers of these centers. The Leakey Research and Rehabilitation Center for Orangutans in southern Borneo, and two other centers on the island, have cared for hundreds of these orphans. In 1997, the Wanariset Orangutan Reintroduction Project in East Kalimantan received 118 baby Orangutans, and in 1998, 60 more arrived (Paul 1998). In August, 1998, the station held 171 refugee and injured Orangutans, most very young (Kaplan and Rogers 2000). Many mother Orangutans died of starvation, trying to sustain themselves on acacia bark, and their young were so weak they could hold on no longer and fell to the ground. Some mothers were eaten by the starving local people, and others succumbed to disease (Kaplan and Rogers 2000). Even those saved and rehabilitated have a low rate of survival. Fewer than half survive in the wild, according to Martinus de Kam, site manager of the Wanariset Forestry Research Project (Paul 1998).
Birute Galdikas, a renowned primatologist and the world's foremost expert on the species, runs the Leakey center and was almost overwhelmed by the numbers of orphans to care for. Moreover, quite a few Orangutans that had been rehabilitated over the past decade and returned to the rainforest came back to the Leakey center for food as their forests were burned or fruit trees cut. In the early 1990s, Orangutan populations were estimated at more than 22,000, with 9,200 on Sumatra and up to 15,546 on Borneo (Nowak 1999). Few believe that more than 15,000 survived the forest destruction and fires of the late 20th century. Galdikas has stated that the species may be doomed to extinction, left with too little habitat to survive. Two primatologists, Gisela Kaplan and Lesley J. Rogers (2000), who have studied Orangutans for many years, conclude that these fires may have been enough to set the final scene for their extinction in Borneo before too many years. Wild populations are unable to sustain the removal of so many female Orangutans. Their reproduction is among the slowest of any mammal. Males are solitary, and females live with their single young for eight to nine years before having another baby (Kuznik 1997). A loss rate of only five Orangutan females out of 1,000 per year can cause a stable population to decline, according to Mark Leighton, a Harvard ecologist conducting research in Borneo's rainforests (Kaplan and Rogers 2000). This rate was surpassed many times during the 1990s. This picture has been further complicated by the recent genetic analysis of Orangutan DNA, which has revealed that there are two, not one species: the Sumatran has been renamed (Pongo abelii) and the Bornean retains the original scientific name, Pongo pygmaeus. These two primates have been long separated from one another and developed changes in their genes that warrant separating them as species (Kaplan and Rogers 2000; Hilton-Taylor 2000). There are physical differences as well. The Bornean Orangutan is far larger than the Sumatran, perhaps because it has not had to be agile to flee from Tigers, since the species is absent on Borneo. Both species are listed in the 2000 IUCN Red List Species, the Sumatran as Critical and the Bornean as Endangered.
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