Orangutan
dr. dolittle | November 4, 2014Just in case you felt like casting a vote for a cute and cuddly cause, the Phoenix Zoo is asking for help in naming a new baby Bornean orangutan. He was born on September 2, 2014 to parents Bess and Michael.
You can vote here
Voting ends November 6th and the winning name will be announced at his/her baby shower on the 8th.
Image of baby orangutan from the Phoenix Zoowww.phoenixzoo.org
razib | June 18, 200920 years ago Jeffrey Schwartz published The Red Ape, making the case that humanity's closest extant relatives within the animal kingdom were orangutans, not chimpanzees. This was contemporaneous with the media hullabaloo around African Eve, so either you could say that Schwartz's timing was perfect, or it was disastrous. Certainly he was swimming against the spirit of the age, and I recall assuming that The Red Ape was a piece of crankery when I first heard about it, its thesis was so outrageous. But historically the idea that humanity descends from Asian apes is less anomalous, and many…
esiegel | May 12, 2008What the heck has this world come to? All over the internet, this picture of an Orangutan trying to fish with a stick has been shown:
But what's the story behind this? Is this evidence that humans are not unique among the Great Apes as tool-users?
Not quite. According to the Daily Mail, this is an orangutan that had extensive exposure to humans; this jungle setting is actually where they reintroduce orangutans into the wild from zoos, private homes and (yikes) butcher shops. This particular orangutan actually doesn't successfully know how to fish; this was something he copied from nearby…
gregladen | April 29, 2008
This is a photograph of a male orangutan attempting to spear a fish.
It is believed that this male has seen fish spearing by local fish spearing men. This is on Kaja Island, in Borneo. Quite a few of the apes in this area are "rehabilitated" having been earlier rescued from human possession. It is often among these rehabilitated apes that we see remarkable behavior of this kind.
This method never worked out for this guy, but reports are that he later figured out how to use spearing to poach fish already caught on lines. This photo is actually published in the book Thinkers of the…
bleimanb | April 29, 2008A soon to be released book, The Thinkers Of The Jungle, by Gerd Schuster, Willie Smits and Jay Ullal, contains this first-ever image of an orangutan attempting to hunt fish with a spear. The picture was taken in Borneo on Kaja, an island where rescued apes are rehabilitated.
Only about 10 million more years of evolution and this orangutan will master the science of noodling.