Andrea Busfield
EXPERTS fear that the wild orangutan may be consigned to the history books within 50 years, another animal driven to extinction by human greed and climate change. But a small army of women are working to buck that trend and their commitment, whether on the ground or in the laboratory, is yielding excellent results.
The Lamandau Wildlife Reserve in Borneo reported last year the birth of seven healthy baby orangutans, much to the surprise and delight of staff who expect to see two or three newborns a year.
“These orangutans were reintroduced to the wild in the late 90s,” says Ashley Leiman, OBE, founder of the UK-registered charity, Orangutan Foundation. “Today, they are all wild, but from an ex-captive background. Since we reintroduced them to the reserve there have been more than 85 births, but last year was quite incredible because we had seven births.
“From a conservation protection point of view, there can be no better result than to see an increase in the population of a diminishing species.”
The population of Bornean orangutans has declined by 55 per cent in the past ten years, with numbers falling from 230,000 to 104,700 and expected to fall further to 47,000 by 2025. It is no coincidence that their natural habitat, the rainforest, has also shrunk by the same percentage in the past 30 years.
For Ashley, it was the future of the rainforest that initially stirred her to action in the 1970s.
“I visited the Taman Negara national park in Malaysia and that was where it all started. I walked through this incredible primary forest and just knew that it had to be saved. I also knew that if we were going to save the trees, we would need the species of the forest.
The simple truth is, that orangutans can’t survive without trees and trees can’t survive without orangutans.”
ACCORDING to the World Wide Fund for Nature, one of the biggest drivers of deforestation in Borneo has been the growth of oil palm plantations. But while reports of rainforest destruction wrought by large plantations have made headlines, recent satellite images indicate rainforest loss in Indonesia is mainly driven by smallholders.
It’s a worrying trend that has led the world’s biggest supplier of sustainable palm oil to invest £26.5million into solving the problem.
Sime Darby Plantation (SDP) has been using DNA fingerprinting to cultivate higher yielding palms to meet an ever-growing demand for palm oil, present in more than half the products on supermarket shelves.
In trials, GenomeSelect seeds produced an oil yield increase of up to 20 per cent and the company plans to share this breakthrough with smallholders. Dr Sukganah Apparow, Manager for Molecular Breeding at
ON A MISSION: From the top, Michelle Desilets, Dr Sukganah Apparow, Ashley Leiman and Sue Sheward use their own particular skills to support the organgutans
the SDP laboratory in Malaysia, said: “We have to meet this need for global consumption of palm oil, and by studying DNA patterns, we came up with a novel genetic prediction technology that helped us predict highyielding palms which we tested in the lab and then transferred to our fields.
“Our initial prediction was an increase in oil yield of 15 per cent, enabling it to feed an extra 15 million people, but four years into the study we saw the yield is actually up to 20 per cent more.”
Finding a way to squeeze an extra 20 per cent out of oil palm crops