Poaching causes orangutan populations to collapse in pristine forest areas
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.com
August 12, 2010
Orangutan encounter rates have fallen six-fold in Borneo over the past 150 years, report researchers writing in the journal PLoS One. Erik Meijaard, an ecologist with People and Nature Consulting International, and colleagues compared present-day encounter rates with collection rates from naturalists working in the mid-19th Century. They found orangutans are much rarer today even in pristine forest areas. The results suggest hunting is taking a toll on orangutan populations. “Whereas some early explorers would see as many as eight orangutans in one tree or encounter three dozen along a river in a single day, today, in the same forests, spotting orangutan in the wild is rare,” Meijaard told mongabay.com via email. The results suggest hunting is taking a toll on orangutan populations. “Recent interviews of nearly 7000 villagers in Kalimantan [the Indonesian part of Borneo] revealed that over a thousand orangutans are still killed annually by local people, of which more than 50% is for food,” he said. Meijaard and his co-authors highlight several factors that may have led to an increase in hunting in Borneo, including a particularly unusual one for Northern Borneo: a ban on head-hunting by colonial rulers in Malaysia. … Looking at data from Indonesian Borneo, the researchers note a correlation between orangutan densities and the distance from villages: more remote forest areas have more orangutans. … “The present study and another one that we still need to publish increasingly indicate that hunting by local people has been and still is a massive threat to orangutans in Kalimantan. Not a single program is addressing that issue though. Why? Is it too sensitive to blame poor Dayaks? Or is it too difficult? Whichever the reason, it is obvious that unless we can address hunting, pretty much all of Kalimantan’s orangutans that occur outside protected areas are doomed.”
