A7NewsThursday, January 26, 2012 Jakarta Globe

Fidelis E. Satriastanti

Samboja Lestari, East Kalim-antan. If a rehabilitation center meant to prepare orangutans for release into the wild is still packed with the apes, then the effort to protect the species has not been good enough, a leading conserva-tionist says.

“If the rehabilitation center takes in more orangutans than it releases, that means we’ve failed,” Aschta Boestani Tajudin, the East Kalimantan regional program manager for the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, said during a recent visit to the BOSF rehabilitation center in Samboja Lestari.

“If we were to succeed, then this center would be closed down,” she said.

Since the 1990s, BOSF has worked to rehabilitate captive orangutans and reintroduce them back into the wild. It now has a to-tal 850 orangutans in rehabilita-tion — 650 at a facility in Nyaru Menteng, Central Kalimantan, and 200 in Samboja Lestari.

First, QuarantineAt the Nyaru Menteng facility, previously captive orangutans have to go through several steps of rehabilitation before they can return to their native habitat.

“The first and second steps are quarantine and socialization, which run for years,” said Denny Kurniawan, the program devel-opment leader for the BOSF in Nyaru Menteng.

“It’s during those stages that we familiarize them with their wild habits again.”

It’s a costly process. The foun-dation spends $3,500 a year for each orangutan in its care.

“That doesn’t include the cost for treating them if they fall sick,” Aschta said.

“If you’re going to release them, you need them to be healthy. Orangutans are easily infected with human diseases when they live among humans.

“Two common diseases are tuberculosis and hepatitis. You

can never fully cure an orangutan of TB once it’s infected, and it’s contagious. If we find one orang-utan with TB in a pack of 20, then the others must also go into quar-antine.”

A single TB test for an orang-utan costs Rp 550,000 ($62) and they must be carried out every three months.

Then, RetrainingAnother cost is that of retraining the animals.

“Many of the orangutans that are sent to us act like humans be-cause they are used to being around humans, and this isn’t good for them because it erases their basic instinct as primates,” Denny said.

To fix this, orangutans are taken to a group of small islands in the Sei Gohong River. These in-clude the 108-hectare Kaja Island, where 45 orangutans are now un-dergoing rehabilitation for a year before they can be considered fit for release.

The long and painstaking re-habilitation process, Aschta said, is necessary to reverse the nega-tive influence that humans can have on orangutans in captivity.

“Orangutans imitate what we do. They know just by watching us,” she said. “It’s so sad to see them being humanized. They can learn within months, but it takes many years to restore their origi-nal behavior.”

The orangutans receive train-ing on finding food and building nests at the “forest school.” But only those who are less than 14 years old are eligible to return to the wild because the older ones don’t learn as easily.

“Releasing those that can’t build a nest is the same as send-ing them into a killing field,” As-chta said.

The rehabilitation center has taken care of more than 600 orangutans since it was estab-lished in 1998.

“We keep receiving more orangutans from people, but sad-ly we sometimes have to reject them because we have limited space,” Denny said.

The rejected animals are usu-ally turned over to the local au-thorities.

Finally, ReleaseOf the 850 orangutans in the BOSF’s care, around 600 are ready to be set free while the rest are not considered healthy enough to survive in the wild.

The foundation last released 30 of the apes in the Meratus Mountains in South Kalimantan in 2002. Now it plans to let six go in East Kalimantan this April.

Its target, however, is to release all the captive animals by 2015.

Aschta said progress was slow because the foundation needed to find the right kind of habitat for the orangutans.

“There’s a misconception that orangutans just need virgin for-est. They also need secondary

forest and swamp areas,” she said. “They need a habitat that is 20 to 30 percent primary forest to make nests, but there should also be secondary forests for them to find food and socialize.

“Most importantly, however, is the need to ensure security, to guarantee that those areas won’t be converted within 30 years. In Indonesia, though, policies change when officials change.”

Orangutans, Aschta said, were an umbrella species, which meant they had a very wide scope of habitat. “So if we protect them, we can protect other species in that habitat,” she said.

To provide suitable habitats, the BOSF set up the company Restorasi Habitat Orangutan Indo-nesia (Indonesian Orangutan Hab-itat Restoration), which was grant-ed a concession for 86,000 hectares

of land in East Kalimantan. The permit cost Rp 13 million.

“We get our funding from outside donors,” said Bungaran Saragih, the BOSF founder. “It’s a bit ironic that most of it comes from abroad instead of from our own people.”

For its next release in April, the BOSF plans to rent helicopters, at Rp 60 million an hour for nearly four hours, to transport the six orangutans to their new habitat.

“The last time, when we re-leased 30 orangutans, it didn’t turn out very well, so we’re try-ing to release them in smaller groups,” Aschta said.

“It was a very hard journey be-cause we needed to walk six to eight hours, carrying the cages deep into the forest. But now we’ll use helicopters and keepers will check on the cages regularly.”

Orangutan Rehab Slow but Thorough

Environment

Developing primate conservation projects, particularly for great apes, can contribute toward the long-term health of forests and to carbon sequestration schemes, scientists contend.

Ian Redmond, a tropical field biologist and conservationist, said primates and other fruit-eating animals were crucial to forests because of their role in seed dispersal.

“Fruit-eating animals have been long known to play a very important role in the life cycle of tropical forests, with between 75 to 95 percent of tree species having their seeds dispersed by such animals,” he said.

But that key role, he warned, is in jeopardy because of human activity.

“I feel that we have to turn that around. I know that the only

populations of great apes that are known to be increasing are the two tiny populations of mountain gorillas who got down to fewer than 300 each,” Redmond said.

“Other gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gibbons are all declining.”

He is pushing for efforts to save the animals to be included in schemes to reduce carbon emissions through deforestation and forest degradation, known as REDD Plus. That way, he says, money for these projects can also go toward primate conservation schemes.

“Conservation is not an optional extra that you might add on if it’s convenient,” Redmond said.

“It’s integral [to REDD Plus]. If you want to have permanence in your forest carbon store,

you need the animals as well as the plants.”

He said Indonesia was one of the countries that was best placed to push these efforts because it was home to the endangered orangutan, the only great ape species in Asia.

Others species such as chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos are only found in Africa.

“The hope is that there will be a realization that forests are not just an ornamental part of our planet, but that they are integral to the function of our biosphere and future survival,” Redmond said. ”

Laura D’Arcy, the Zoological Society of London’s co-country coordinator in Indonesia, said these efforts could start with preserving peat forests for their high carbon content.

“This would benefit orangutans who prefer these

habitats compared to tropical forests on mineral soil, because the high water level in peatlands allows flowers and fruit to be available all year long for orangutans,” she said.

Eleven of 17 active REDD projects being carried out in Indonesia are in peat swamp forests. D’Arcy said this was a “win-win” situation for apes and humans alike because of the high value of carbon that could be offset for emissions caused by the conversion of forests to palm oil plantations elsewhere.

“Peat swamp forests have low-yield production of palm oil, reducing the cost of carbon emissions required in areas with high density,” she said.

“But that’s bad news for more high-yield, mineral soils, which are more biodiverse than peat forests.” Ronna Nirmala

Save the Apes and You Save the Forests: Scientists

An orangutan eating jackfruit in Kalimantan. Primates disperse seeds in the wild, which helps to conserve forests. JG Photo/Ronna Nirmala

A baby orangutan at a Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation rehabilitation center in East Kalimantan on Jan. 11. JG Photo/Fidelis E. Satriastanti

Ulma Haryanto

In the wake of calls to put an end to the macaque trade, a company that breeds a long-tailed breed for laboratory experiments has de-fended its practices as necessary for saving human lives.

“We need [the macaques] in order to test medicine before it is tested on humans,” said Herman Riadi, director for development at Universal Fauna, adding that some vaccines for humans still use kidney tissues from monkey fetuses as an ingredient.

“If animal rights NGOs can provide a solution for this and we

don’t have to use monkeys any-more, then they’re more than welcome,” he said.

The British Union for the Abo-lition of Vivisection, which cam-paigns for an end to lab experi-ments with animals, earlier this week released a video that they said showed monkeys being re-moved from the jungles of Yogya-karta last year.

The video shows several men capturing long-tailed monkeys, bagging them and cramming them in small crates and cages. BUAV co-director Sarah Kite said in a statement that the monkeys in the footage were trapped for Universal Fauna.

Herman confirmed that his company had received more than 200 long-tailed macaques from Gunung Kidul, Yogyakarta, in December, but only at the request of the region’s Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA).

“The monkeys have been seen as pests there,” he said. “These monkeys don’t have predators anymore. In the past, Java still had tigers that preyed on the monkeys, controlling the population.”

Herman said BKSDA initially asked Universal Fauna to take 600 monkeys, “but we refused and asked them to recalculate.”

Since Universal Fauna has two breeding facilities, Herman said,

they have no need for monkeys captured from the wild.

“We have been exporting monkeys that are bred in our fa-cilities since 1985,” he said.

BUAV said that Indonesia’s primates are usually exported to the United States and Japan for research, which Herman con-firmed, and added that national research company Bio Farma, a vaccine and serum manufacturer in Indonesia, is also a client.

Herman said Universal Fauna has been ISO certified for animal experimentation production.

“We have standardized treat-ment and quality adhering to an-imal welfare,” he said.

But Kite said the treatment of the monkeys shown in the video did not reflect animal welfare.

“This footage is a shocking confirmation of the cruelty and suffering that Indonesia allows to be inflicted on its wild popula-tions of macaques,” Kite said.

“We urge the international community to voice its objections to this cruelty and to also raise concerns about the conservation status of this species.”

The long-tailed macaque is listed as threatened under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and it tops the list of most heavily traded animals in the world.

Criticized Macaque Trade ‘Needed’ to Save Lives, Firm Argues

Amy Coopes

Dubbo, Australia. The arid plains fringing Australia’s desert center are more suited to camels than blooms of coral but here, hundreds of miles from the coast, a piece of the Great Barrier Reef has been put on ice.

Suspended in a liquid nitrogen chamber of minus 196 degrees Celsius, the 70 billion sperm and 22 billion coral embryos are part of an ambitious Australian-first proj-ect to preserve and perhaps one day regenerate the famous reef.

“We know the Great Barrier Reef is in deep, deep trouble be-cause of a number of different things — global threats including climate change and acidification of waters as well as the warming of waters,” said the project’s di-rector, Rebecca Spindler.

“We will never have as much genetic diversity again as we do right now on the reef; this is our last opportunity to save as much as we possibly can.”

Spindler’s team is working with Hawaii-based Mary Hage-dorn from the Smithsonian Insti-tute to collect and freeze samples from the World Heritage-listed reef, a sprawling and vivid natu-ral wonder visible from space.

In order to maximize the amount of reproductive cells — gametes — collected the team cut away sections of the reef and took them back to land-based tanks to spawn, an event that only occurs for three days a year.

Experts from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, a ma-jor partner in the research, then tagged the reef sections and re-turned them to Orpheus Island, literally gluing them back to their original sites.

They plan to create a catalogue of coral species as insurance against increasing bleaching linked to ocean warming and acidification and a range of threats including chemical run-off, dredging and damage from cyclones and floods.

Eventually Spindler hopes to grow in-vitro reefs that can be used to reseed wild populations — something she is “confident” will be possible in a few years time.

Experts at Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo, Australia’s top wildlife reproductive lab, keep the frozen reef ticking over with regular liq-uid nitrogen top-ups while they explore optimal conditions for re-viving and mating the coral.

Some 400 kilometers inland from the coast and far closer to desert than ocean, Dubbo seems an unlikely location for marine research.

Giraffes, rhinos and elephants roam the 300-hectare zoo and the lab, which backs onto a mat-ing enclosure for the endangered Tasmanian devil, is a hive of hor-monal experiments using animal droppings and urine.

Spermologist Nana Satake did her doctorate in pig reproduction and usually works with African and native animals, but she sees the Reef Recovery Project as an exciting challenge.

“The Great Barrier Reef is re-ally a bit of an enigma. There’s very little [research that’s been] done on coral reef production from [its] coral species,” Satake said, describing it as the “rainfor-est of the ocean.”

“Coral is one of the most unique species of the world, real-ly of any organism, because they actually have all types of repro-duction; they can reproduce asex-ually and sexually.”

Agence France-Presse

Great Barrier Reef Hopes On Ice in Outback

A British animal rights group has demanded that Indonesia end the trade in endangered long-tailed macaques. AFP Photo/BUAV

‘It’s a bit ironic that most of our funding comes from abroad instead of from our own people’Bungaran Saragih, BOSF