Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by Craig Newberry, Communications Take inspiration from Godek and Batu! Photo: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Woodland Park Zoo The word orangutan comes from two Malay words, "orang," meaning person and "hutan," meaning forest. For International Orangutan Day, Woodland Park Zoo is highlighting the "people of the forest," the challenges they've overcome and how we all can help save these critically endangered apes. Orangutans face several threats that are rapidly destroying the forest environments they require for survival, including human overpopulation, logging and agriculture. One of the most significant threats is the conversion of forests to unsustainable monocultures, such as palm oil plantations. Watch:  https://youtu.be/dOWhf52YIbA The HUTAN-Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Programme is a long-time Woodland Park Zoo partner dedicated to conserving Borneo's threatened habitats and wildlife species. For the past few years, HUTAN’s researche...

Posted by Meghan Sawyer, Communications Felicity (on the right) and Oceane (on the left) rest in a tree. Photo: HUTAN Today, on International Orangutan Day, we are getting word about something that’s never happened before—and it’s incredible! For the first known time, an orangutan has adopted another orangutan in the wild after the 5-year-old youngster tragically lost her mother. Meet Felicity and Oceane, two orangutans whose relationship proves that sometimes love can defy one’s wildest expectations. Scientists with Woodland Park Zoo’s conservation partner HUTAN have been observing wild orangutans in Borneo for decades, but had never observed a bond formed like this. Marc Ancrenaz, Scientific Director for HUTAN, watched the relationship blossom between then-14-year-old Felicity and 5-year-old Oceane before his very eyes. Ancrenaz says that after the loss of Oceane’s mother Jenny, it was a silver lining that no one was expecting. Jenny, seen here in 2012, was the dominant female at ...

Posted by Rebecca Whitham, Vice President of Engagement with Photos by Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren, WPZ  A female proboscis monkey and her baby in Borneo’s Kinabatangan region. The boat driver cuts the engine. We slowly bob and drift along the river toward the direction of what has caught the observation team’s eyes—a sight found nowhere else in the world: the improbably proportioned proboscis monkey. Researchers with HUTAN’s primate observation unit have spotted a small family group. With the aid of binoculars and a clipboard, they take note of juveniles playing, female adults nearby at rest. A dominant male on a branch all his own watches over us, potbelly flopped over almost as characteristically as his nose.  Our team recognizes a male proboscis monkey by his signature nose. That signature nose is meant to signal his attractiveness, and possibly act as a sound enhancer for better group management. It also has given the proboscis monkey its name and its prominence in the eco-st...

Guest scientist post by: Marc Ancrenaz, PhD, HUTAN, a Woodland Park Zoo Partner for Wildlife Courtesy of HUTAN. Orangutans are now one step closer to extinction. Based on an assessment led by Borneo Futures, scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) have officially downgraded the status of the orangutans living in Borneo to Critically Endangered , the last step before reaching the dreadful status of Extinct in the Wild. Scientists have proven that the number of orangutans will decline by about 80% between 1950 and 2025 given current development plans by the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia. These numbers are hard to fathom. To put them in perspective, an 80% decline is equivalent to losing four out of five people you know ; it is equivalent to the disappearance of a staggering six billion of the current global human population in 75 years with no new births. Actually, many populations of orangutans have already disappeared in Borne...