PONTIANAK, Indonesia — As the forests of Indonesian Borneo burned during fires last year, a female orangutan was forced to leave her burning home. When she was rescued from a small farm, experts found signs of recent pregnancy and wounds on her body. The orangutan, later named Epen by her rescuers, was found foraging at […]
Tag: Indonesia
Indonesia plans IVF for recently captured Sumatran rhino
EAST LAMPUNG, Indonesia — Indonesian authorities will make their first attempt at in vitro fertilization of a Sumatran rhino, aiming to boost the critically endangered species’ gene pool in the process. The egg for the IVF attempt will come from Pahu, a solitary female Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) being held at the Kelian Lestari Sumatran […]
Dolphins Rescued From Swimming With Tourists in a Hotel Pool Now Doing Well at a Sanctuary!
Dolphins are extremely intelligent and social creatures who in the wild live stimulating lives with their pods. Their natural habitat is the ocean for a reason — they need to swim free! They have strong family bonds and are playful and skilled. Unfortunately, they are victims of merciless exploitation on behalf of humans. They are […]
Heartbreaking images show endangered orangutans driven from homes by forest fires
These heartbreaking images show endangered orangutans made homeless as farmers jeopardise their habitat. The pictures show a troop of these magnificent creatures gathered near water at their reserve on Salat Island, Borneo, after being driven from wooded areas by illegal land clearing. Satellites show that the number of such blazes across Borneo and Sumatra are […]
Orangutan numbers drop as much as 30 per cent in Malaysian palm oil estate forests
The number of endangered orangutans living in forest patches found in oil palm estates in the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah fell as much as 30 per cent between 2002 and 2017, but the overall population of the species in the area is stable, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said on Thursday. Their […]
How Did a Dead Humpback Whale End Up in the Amazon Rainforest?
When they followed vultures into the rainforest on Marajó Island in Brazil, near the mouth of the Amazon River officials with the state health, sanitation and environment department made a surprising discovery. The birds were feeding on the carcass of a 10-ton, 26-foot-long humpback whale calf. The calf, about a year old, was in an […]
Ground-feeding birds in Southeast Asia may be going extinct outside protected areas
Nature reserves in large parts of Southeast Asia may be the last strongholds for charismatic ground-feeding birds such as quails, partridges and pheasants, together called galliforms, according to a recent study in Conservation Letters. Researchers estimate that five species of galliforms no longer survive outside protected areas in Sundaland, a region comprising the Malay Peninsula […]
The long journey to saving the Sumatran rhino, via Borneo (commentary)
In 1982, an orangutan researcher working in Indonesian Borneo wrote to a colleague at the biology department at the National University in Jakarta. He told of meeting a traditional-medicine trader at the market in Pangkalan Bun, a city in Central Kalimantan province. “A whole Sumatran rhino head is immersed in coconut oil in a basin,” […]
