Bornean orangutans, gray bats and Grauer’s gorillas are among the endangered species in the news this week. This Week’s Most Heartbreaking Story: A family of Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) was photographed clinging to the sole remaining tree in their former forest habitat after the rest of it had been chopped down for a palm oil [...]

Nearly 3,000 chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans are illegally killed or stolen from the wild each year, according to a new report (pdf) from the United Nations Environmental Programme’s (UNEP) Great Apes Survival Partnership (GASP). The report, released to coincide with this week’s meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild [...]

What better way to study the world’s largest arboreal animals than by putting an eye in the sky? A team of scientists working in Indonesia has done just that by launching inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drone airplanes), to study critically endangered Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) from above the treetops. The technology is already being [...]

What can poop tell us about orangutans? Well, for one thing, a study of wild orangutan feces has revealed that these great apes, unlike some other species, are not chronically stressed by ecotourism. Scat shows no scare in a study, published March 15 in PLoS One, that analyzed fecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGM) levels of Bornean [...]

With the release of the Apple iPad 3 rumored for March, a bunch of first- and second-generation iPads are probably about to hit the secondary market. Some of them just might end up in the hands of orangutans. The nonprofit Orangutan Outreach is collecting donated iPads for its new Apps for Apes program, which is [...]

It’s hard to believe there are still places on Earth that haven’t been fully explored. And yet this week brings news that conservation teams working in jungles in Bangladesh and Borneo have discovered previously unknown populations of two critically endangered species, the Irrawaddy dolphin and the Bornean orangutan. In Bangladesh, the news is especially good, [...]