The Dvur Kralove Zoo keeps four Bornean orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus): male Elmar, females Zaneta and Satu, and little Besar, Zaneta's young. Their former home, the Old Pavilion built in 1984, was no longer up to the modern breeding standards. Besides, it had to accommodate also chimpanzees and gorillas, which caused various complications.
In November 2009, the orang-utan troop was transferred to a new modern pavilion where they will be kept in as natural conditions as possible. Five cameras were installed in the pavilion during the construction for The Relatives, a new joint project of Czech Radio Online and Zoo Dvur Kralove.
Our live webcast will allow users to watch orang-utans, their behaviour and interaction with other members of the troop. The name of the project - Relatives - reflects all the focus points of the project, i.e. to obtain better knowledge about the relatedness of orang-utans with humans as well as with gorillas whose ethology we studied in the Revealed project.
Orang-utans are listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. According to estimates, the wild population of the Bornean orang-utan ranges from 50,000 to 55,000, and the population of the critically endangered Sumatran orang-utan is between 6,000 and 6,500.
Both species are threatened primarily by loss of their natural habitats as the tropical rain forests on their native Sumatra and Borneo, respectively, are being destroyed by logging, wildfires, and conversion to palm plantations. Despite their official protection, young orang-utans are being hunted and illegally sold as pets. This coupled with a low reproduction rate causes the population to be dropping constantly. The natural habitats of orang-utans have been shrinking by 2.5 percent a year. Some scientists warn that at the current rate of rainforests destruction, the Bornean orang-utan will become extinct by 2050, and the Sumatran orang-utan even earlier.
Several wildlife protection organisations have been trying to rescue orang-utan. They fight illegal logging in rainforests and other phenomena behind the negative development. They aim to create sustainable economic alternatives for communities living near natural orang-utan habitats, which helps remove the root causes of poaching and forest exploitation. A major part of their efforts is involvement of local citizens in active protection of orang-utans in national parks. Rescue stations for orphan orang-utans do the primary protection job. Orang-utans are also bred in zoos as a way of helping the species survive. There are currently 710 orang-utans being bred in captivity.
Another aim of our project is to rise public awareness about the deplorable state of environmental protection in Indonesia, the extremely fast destruction of the natural habitats of orang-utans, and some of the ways to support rescue projects that are fighting those negative developments.
Join us in discovering how orang-utans live and behave, and in helping them survive. In the end, all living beings on the planet Earth are relatives.
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