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Species Spotlight: Orangutan
In the Indonesian and Malaysian languages orang means "person" and hutan means "forest." Combined it's a suitable name for this "person of the forest," which spends its life high in the tropical treetops but is also one of our closest cousins: Orangutans and humans share 97 percent of the same DNA.
Once found throughout Southeast Asia, orangutans now live only in Borneo and Sumatra, and their numbers have dropped by 92 percent in the past century. Under ideal conditions, these solitary apes gracefully travel the forest from branch to branch in search of food. Their favorite is durian, a fruit that tastes like a sweet, cheesy, garlic custard. They also eat leaves, bark and insects.
Asia's biggest primates—and the largest tree-living mammal in the world—orangutans can stand four feet tall and weigh up to 200 pounds. From fingertip to fingertip, an adult male's arms can stretch an impressive 7 feet. Uniquely adapted for their arboreal lifestyle, with feet designed like hands for climbing, orangutans need never touch the ground.
But as logging and land conversion decimates the rain forests of Indonesia, the great red man is losing his home. Habitat loss to palm oil plantations endangers them, as do poachers and loggers—who kill mothers to nab infants for the live animal trade. Logging is also driven partly by demand for ramin, a type of timber, used to make everything from dowels to particle board to broom handles to furniture. The United States is one of the largest consumers. You can help orangutans by asking retailers to refrain from selling products that contain ramin and by buying food products that contain palm oil only from sustainable sources.
Working together, we just might be able to keep our red ape relatives hanging around.
