Borneo Orangutan News

To some humans, the idea of treating an orangutan as a person is absurd. For Leif Cocks, spending billions of dollars to find life on Mars while living beings are…

Logging for timber by definition reduces tree cover. But what happens when logging stops? A new study has found that in concessions where timber firms have stopped operating, deforestation actually…

JAKARTA — The fires that raze vast swaths of Indonesian Borneo every year are having a lasting health impact on the region’s critically endangered orangutans that threatens them with extinction,…

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with our adventurous Middle East-based staff writer John Cannon, who recently traveled the length of the Pan Borneo Highway to assess…

The global trade of products that come at the expense of tropical forest is driving many primate species closer to extinction, a new study suggests. The research, published June 17…

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Kinari Webb, founder of Health in Harmony, an organization using healthcare for humans to save rainforests and their wildlife inhabitants.…

A prototype system to identify rare species in real time using thermal-imaging cameras mounted on unmanned aircraft, or drones, passed its latest test when it successfully identified orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus)…

“It was very peculiar,” says Anne Russon, a primatologist and psychology professor from York University, Toronto, recalling her 2010 study of orangutans in Indonesia's Kutai National Park. Having previously worked…

Social anthropologist Liana Chua leads a project, POKOK, that aims to reduce the killing of orangutans in Indonesian Borneo through deeper engagement with local people. The project came about as…

Researchers say a recent Indonesian government report inaccurately claims that the orangutan population in the country is increasing, which could have significant implications for future conservation plans. The report, issued…

KUCHING, Malaysia — For more than a decade, June Mary Rubis has worked on orangutan conservation in Borneo. The critically endangered apes face a bleak future there, hammered by habitat…

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia — Authorities in Indonesia are investigating the killing of a rare orangutan whose body was found riddled with bullet and knife wounds in an oil palm plantation…

On May 17, 2018, the first eight orange-furred students arrived to begin their studies at a new orangutan forest school in the province of East Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo. Under…

JAKARTA — At least six illegal logging camps have sprung up in a peat forest in Indonesian Borneo that the government had declared off-limits last year, a Greenpeace investigation has…

JAKARTA — Activists in Indonesia are calling for a set of federal guidelines on orangutan conservation that will compel local authorities and companies to take a more active role in…

JAKARTA — Two years after he announced a freeze on new oil palm plantation permits, President Joko Widodo of Indonesia finally appears to be on the verge of putting it…

Rafts of research in the past few decades have convinced scientists that there's less that separates humans from other animals than we'd originally thought. Take the concept of culture, for…

On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with the co-author of a new book about the minds and lives of animals — their memories, how we know that…

JAKARTA — Police in Indonesia have arrested and charged four farmers with the killing of an orangutan found shot more than 100 times. Investigators in East Kalimantan province, in Indonesian…

JAKARTA — The world lost nearly 150,000 orangutans from the island of Borneo in the past 16 years due to habitat loss and killing, and is on track to lose…

JAKARTA — A second orangutan has been found killed in Indonesian Borneo in as many months, this time shot more than 100 times with a pellet gun, a conservation group…

JAKARTA — Police in Indonesia have arrested and charged two rubber farmers for allegedly shooting and beheading a Bornean orangutan whose body was discovered last month in a river. Investigators…

JAKARTA — Indonesian authorities have retrieved 17 air gun pellets from the body of an orangutan found decapitated and seemingly tortured in Indonesian Borneo earlier this week. The discovery was…

JAKARTA — Conservation authorities in Indonesia are investigating the death of an orangutan whose headless and apparently tortured body was found earlier this week in a river in central Borneo.…

The natural world is full of medicines, many of which have been tapped by pharmaceutical companies to derive products that adorn our drugstore shelves and bathroom cabinets. But humans aren’t…

Airborne mapping of the northern part of the island of Borneo has revealed that forests there pack some of the highest levels of carbon on the planet, even in a…

Earlier this month, a new orangutan species discovered in Sumatra, Indonesia officially became the eighth great ape species known to exist on Earth — and, thanks to habitat destruction caused…

The sustainability and legality claims of the largest plywood importer in the US have come under question after it was found to have received shipments of Malaysian plywood worth more…

It’s not uncommon to find ecologist Greg Asner flying transects over the rainforests of the Amazon or Borneo. His specially outfitted plane has helped map out the three-dimensional structure of…

Scientists and conservationists have long believed that the rapid loss of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, “primary” rainforests in recent decades would leave one of its most iconic inhabitants, the orangutan, with…