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CHICAGO - The remaining 62,000 orangutans in the wild could be wiped out within decades as forests in their Asian island habitat are decimated by loggers and palm oil farmers, say conservationists.
American zookeepers met at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo with conservationists working on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra to sort through problems faced by the red-haired Asian apes and find solutions.
"There are quick and easy things everyone can do," said Ian Singleton, director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme on the Indonesian island, home to 6700 of the critically endangered fruit-eating animals, distinctive for their thoughtful dispositions, strength and lion-like mating call.
Borneo, shared by Malaysia and Indonesia, is home to 55,000 orang-utans.
"Don't play into stereotypes when buying a [greeting] card with an orang-utan with his hair teased up," Mr Singleton said.
"Education is one of the strongest components and one of the best ways forward."
Zoos can play a role educating the public to buy foods or biodiesel fuel made only with sustainable palm oil, rather than from palm oil from plantations carved out of newly cut forests, Mr Singleton and other experts said.
Do not buy furniture - even toothpicks - made from tropical hardwoods that is not certified, which could mean it was harvested illegally inside areas designated as "protected", they said.
And drop a contribution into zoo collection boxes destined for underfunded conservation efforts, they said. "American zoos receive 180 million visitors a year - an astonishing number of people.
If all those people put in $1, current funding of a few million dollars from the World Bank and other donors would be multiplied," said Serge Wich, who surveys orang-utan populations for the Great Ape Trust.
The decline of orangutan populations has been rapid, Mr Wich said, though figures are hard to come by, and their remaining habitat is shrinking at alarming rates.
A report this year from the United Nations' Environment Programme said Indonesia's forest habitat for orangutans may be gone by 2022 without intervention.
According to conservationists, a licence granted to cut down select trees is often followed by illegal clear-cutting, with palm oil planting close behind.
Male orang-utans usually flee the area, but females, with their young, often stay behind and may be killed and their infants kidnapped for the pet trade.
Hundreds of orangutans are rescued and taken to temporary sanctuaries, hopefully to be reintroduced into the wild.
Many attending the workshops expressed outrage at the exploitation for entertainment of the intelligent apes, which can grow to 136kg with a 2.13m armspan - which often triggers demand for orang-utans as pets.
"Orang-utans and other great apes are not the only thing we are trying to protect here.
"These species stand for integrity of forests and ecosystems," Mr Wich said.
The few hundred remaining Sumatran tigers, as well as elephants, languors, gibbons and many other rare species are also threatened.
Wich said fires raged again last year over vast peat forests drained by canals that were dug on the islands a decade ago, further crimping orangutan habitat and releasing large storehouses of greenhouse gases.
Balancing the needs of impoverished local human populations on the islands against the animals' needs is a challenge, the experts said.
But government officials at both the national and local level have taken up the environmental cause, though they often lack the tools to direct development away from forested land.
"They don't have computers, they don't have satellite imagery of their own areas," Singleton said.
"If you want them to not put palm oil estates on high-value forests, they have to know where they are."
UNDER THREAT
* A threatened tree-dwelling ape, orangutan means "man of the forest" in the Malay language.
* Males make long, loud calls that carry up to 1km to stake out territory and attract females.
* The orangutan Clyde was Clint Eastwood's pet sidekick in the film Every Which Way But Loose and its sequel Any Which Way You Can.
* Critically endangered through logging and loss of habitat.
- Reuters
