Orang-utan may be extinct within a couple of decades
By Rosli Abidin Yahya

Orang-utan or 'man of the forest'

Great apes of Borneo Island

Native to the island of Borneo, the great ape of orang-utan is expected to be extinct within 20 years, World Wide Fund for Nature reported in its January 12 issue.

It said that deforestation and hunting is taking such a toll that within two decades, the orang-utan is likely to vanish from the wild in the only two places it still lives - the islands of Sumatra and Borneo.

The 1997-1998 fires that spread a plume of smog over seven countries, including Brunei Darussalam, and affected 70 million people, were thought to have killed more than 1,000 orang-utans.

Figures from a recent conference in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, show that whereas in 1987, there were between 45,000 and 60,000 orang-utans in the world, that number had fallen to between 25,000 and 30,000 by 2001.

There was no official statistic on the number of orang-utans dwelling in the jungles of Brunei Darussalam, such as the dense forest of Temburong District.

All four of the great apes - the orang-utan, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the pygmy chimpanzee - are increasingly endangered.

But the long-limbed, reddish-brown "man of the forest" (the literal translation of its name in Malay) is particularly vulnerable.

It is the only great ape that is a solitary animal, a fact that has been attributed to its slow rate of reproduction. The orang-utan reaches sexual maturity at the age of 12 and has a life expectancy of 40.

But for its female species, there may be an interval of up to eight years between births.

In a lifetime, she may have no more than four or five offspring.

This means that the orang-utan's dwindling population struggles to rebuild its numbers. Those from the island are also vulnerable, as they cannot mate else-where.

Stuart Chapman, Head of the WWF-UK species programme, said, "The biology of the orang-utan simply does not allow it to sustain the spectacular rates of decline we are now seeing.

A female tiger will produce three to four cubs a year and come into season again in the same year if its cubs are killed.

"The orang-utan is very different and its biology makes it completely unable to adapt to big reductions in its numbers."

Over the past 100 years, WWF believes that Sumatra and Borneo have lost 91 per cent of their orang-utans.

But the decline has increased in recent decades because of the fragmentation and destruction of the animal's natural forest habitats.

This has been caused by commercial logging and the clearing of land for oil palm plantations and agriculture.

According to WWF, almost 80 per cent of forests in Malaysia and Indonesia have been intensively logged.

The orang-utan is also threatened by hunters and poachers working for the bush meat and pet trades as well as by forest fires that have ravaged Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, in recent times.

Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin