Orangutans...who?
The Malay word
orangutan means "person of the forest". These long haired, orangish primates are found only in Sumatera and Borneo, are highly intelligent nd are close relatives of humans.
They are highly intelligent mammals - they share alomst 97% of the human DNA.
Extinction They Face.
Orang-utans in Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak occur mainly in the lowlands. In Sarawak, there are about 1,300 orang-utans, almost all in the Lanjak-Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary and Batang Ai National Park in the south next to West Kalimantan, Indonesia. In Sabah, there were five main areas of special importance with a total of 20,000 orang-utans in the mid 1980s (by WWF-Malaysia working with the Sabah Forestry Depratment, 1986)
By 2004, the orang-utan population in Sabah had dropped to about 11,000 individuals (by Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project working with Sabah Wildlife Deparment, 2003). This decline in their numbers in the last twenty years was caused by planned conversion of forests to plantations in the eastern lowlands.
