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 [...]

Ethiopian lions, Florida panthers, Sumatran rhinos and Yangtze porpoises are among the endangered species in the news this week. Well that was Interesting: The Internet was abuzz this week with “news” about how a pack of lions in Ethiopia supposedly saved a teenage girl from kidnapping rapists. That story actually dates back to 2005 but—as [...]

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 [...]

Researchers working on the island of Borneo have discovered two tiny new populations of Miller’s grizzled langurs (Presbytis hosei canicrus), one of the world’s 25 most endangered primates. The species is so rare that it has probably disappeared from all of its previously known habitats, which have been almost completely logged and burned out of [...]

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 [...]

More than 20,000 orangutans have been poached, killed by loggers or sold into the illegal pet trade in the past 10 years, according to a new report (pdf) from Nature Alert, Ltd., in Bath, England, and the Jakarta, Indonesia–based Center for Orangutan Protection (COP) that says not a single person in Indonesia has been prosecuted [...]

The chimpanzee’s clever use of sticks to fish for termites is fairly well known. In 1964, Jane Goodall announced her groundbreaking discovery to the world, writing in the journal Nature, “During three years in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanganyika, East Africa, I saw chimpanzees use natural objects as tools on many occasions. These [...]

Editor’s Note: While I’m on vacation, I’ve arranged a series of guest posts from other writers who routinely cover animal behavior and cognition. Today’s post, about the controversial mirror self-recognition test in primates, comes from the blogger at Serious Monkey Business. Follow her on twitter: @SrsMonkeyBiz. I have a confession: one of my favorite things [...]