Orangutans' days in the wild may be numbered unless something drastic occurs to halt the pace of illegal logging—and soon, according to researchers.

"At the current rate of habitat destruction, orangutans could be extinct in the wild in ten to twenty years," said Cheryl Knott, an anthropologist at Harvard University.


By some estimates, more than 80 percent of all orangutan habitat has been destroyed. Although once found throughout southeast Asia, orangutans today live only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, and their numbers have dwindled from perhaps several hundred thousand to between 15,000 to 24,000.

Never before has their very existence been threatened so severely. Economic crisis combined with natural disasters and human abuse of the forest are pushing one of humankind’s closest cousins to extinction. Orangutans have lost well over 80% of their habitat in the last 20 years, and an estimated one-third of the wild population died during the fires of 1997-98.

Orangutans are the world's largest arboreal mammal, eating, sleeping, nesting, and traveling in the trees of the rain forest. "They're in the trees 99 percent of the time," said Knott. Rarely coming to the ground, they live on the fruits, leaves, seeds, bark, and insects of the rain forests.

Back round Information