Orangutan Conservancy (OC) board member Dr. Rob Shumaker will be the featured speaker at a special premiere event on August 19 to commemorate the opening of the Red Ape Reserve exhibit at the Oregon Zoo.

Shumaker will discuss his long-term studies regarding orangutan behavior and cognition, and will address the conservation crisis currently facing orangutans in the wild.

Shumaker, who has served on the OC board since 2003, is vice-president of Life Sciences at the Indianapolis Zoo.

The Red Ape Reserve is the new Asian primate exhibit that will house the Oregon Zoo’s gibbons and orangutans in a multi-species enclosure. The three-year project was specifically designed to meet the cognitive and social needs of the apes.

Special OC / Oregon Zoo orangutan-friendly shopping guides will be distributed to commemorate the event.
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Orangutan encounter rates have fallen six-fold in Borneo over the past 150 years, report researchers writing in the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS One).

Erik Meijaard, an ecologist with People and Nature Consulting International, and colleagues compared present-day encounter rates with collection rates from naturalists working in the mid-19th Century. They found orangutans are much rarer today even in pristine forest areas.

“Whereas some early explorers would see as many as eight orangutans in one tree or encounter three dozen along a river in a single day, today, in the same forests, spotting orangutan in the wild is rare,” Meijaard told mongabay.com via email. The results suggest hunting is taking a toll on orangutan populations.

“Recent interviews of nearly 7000 villagers in Kalimantan [the Indonesian part of Borneo] revealed that over a thousand orangutans are still killed annually by local people, of which more than 50% is for food,” he said.

Meijaard and co-authors Alan Welsh, Marc Ancrenaz, Serge Wich, Vincent Nijman, and Andrew J. Marshall highlight several factors that may have led to an increase in hunting in Borneo, including a particularly unusual one for Northern Borneo: a ban on head-hunting by colonial rulers in Malaysia.
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Healthcare workers that care for more than 1,500 orphaned orangutans in rehabilitation centers across Indonesia and Malaysia are gathering this week for the Orangutan Conservancy (OC) 2010 Veterinary Workshop, which will be held August 2-7 in Medan, Sumatra.

The workshop will focus on all aspects of captive orangutan care, with a special emphasis on the detection and treatment of tuberculosis (TB). A joint program between OC and Chembio Diagnostics Systems Inc. provided PrimaTB STAT-PAK test kits to each of the facilities as part of a large-scale tuberculosis study.
The PrimaTB STAT-PAK testing kits are considered useful in the detection of tuberculosis in primates, a severe respiratory disease that can prove deadly.

The OC 2010 Veterinary Workshop is sponsored by the Birmingham (U.S.) chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers (AAZK), a Cleveland Metroparks Zoo Asian Seed Grant, the Chester Zoo, and the Orangutan Conservancy, in association with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Chembio Diagnostics Systems Inc., Murdoch University, and the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program (SOCP).
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The chances of at least 10 orangutans stranded in Thailand of going home to their native Indonesia are looking increasingly slim because of financial constraints.

The orangutans, which were brought to Thailand through illegal trade, are now being held at the Thai government’s Khao Phra rehabilitation center, about 100 kilometers outside Bangkok.

“We are aware of [the orangutans’] status and we have written to the Thai government offering to share the costs of a repatriation shipment, but they have not responded to our requests,” said Harry Santosa, director of biodiversity conservation at the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry.

Harry said there were no regulations, even in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, on how to return illegally traded species to their countries of origin.

“It seems that if the Thai government agreed to pay [to return the orangutans], it might look as if they had taken part in the stealing of the animals,” he said. “But, if all of the expenses were dumped on us, it would be too expensive to bear.”
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