"The Big House", home of the University of Michigan football team, is one of the largest stadiums in the world. This is how it looks when crammed over 100,000 viewers:
Now, imagine the audience was replaced by a Kalimantan orang utan. A fun scene, is not it? Thousands of red-haired monkeys jostle in crowded seats. Well, scientists have just learned that at least 100,000 orangutans have disappeared over the past 16 years. Even more sadly, all the remaining orangutans in Kalimantan will only be able to meet The Big House once more.
The photo above shows, the sharpest slap occurs in areas that are shaved or converted into industrial agriculture (usually palm oil or pulpwood), while orangutans are struggling to live outside the forest.
There is an unexpected positive development in this story: there are actually more orangutans than previously thought. Some populations, in areas that fall within the territory of Malaysia and the great national parks of Indonesia, seem relatively stable, so it seems impossible for this species to become extinct in the near future.
Unfortunately, most orangutans are lost in intact forest areas, or whose high trees are selectively cut. In this area the number of orangutans is shrinking due to hunting (as all animals can be eaten in Borneo).
One analysis, based on interviews with 5,000 locals, found that some hunters did enter forests specifically to hunt orangutans, while local residents generally preferred deer and pigs. But orangutans are easy targets. Orangutans are also increasingly being killed when their forest habitat is cleared so that they are pushed down into the fields and plantations of citizens. Meet orangutans in places like that, frightened or angry citizens then kill.
Orangutans multiply very slowly. Previous research indicates that a population will probably become extinct even if only one reproductive female per 100 adults is annihilated each year. But the rate of slaughter is identified to be three or four times higher than that, which explains the massive extinction in the forests of Borneo.
