Humans teaching Orangutans to climb trees

     

 An orphan orangutan climbs high in the treetops with his caregiver

 

Orangutans are hunted for meat or sold into the illegal wildlife trade. One dedicated doctor saves and rehabilitates captured orangutans and raises orphaned babies.

While much of the world is in lockdown, youngsters in one very unusual classroom are still having lessons. At a forest school in Borneo, baby orangutans learn tree-climbing skills from their human surrogate parents.

The orphans spend 12 hours a day in the forest, preparing for a new life in the wild. With human contact routinely kept to a minimum, life goes on much as before for the animals, says Dr Signe Preuschoft, leader of ape programs for the charity Four Paws, which runs the rehabilitation centre in East Kalimantan (Borneo Indonesia).

As a precaution, the staff now have temperature checks, wear facemasks and change into uniforms on site.The pandemic has disrupted many conservation programs around the world but Dr Preuschoft says it also offers an opportunity to bring positive change.

"There are great opportunities here to protect wildlife better from illegal wildlife trade and from (consumption of) bushmeat," she says. "It's very much about education."

 

Dr Preuschoft with an orphaned orangutan

 

The young orphaned apes climb high into the treetops with their caregivers to help them acquire the skills they would have learned from their mothers in the wild. They would otherwise spend more time on the ground than is natural for a species that feeds, lives and sleeps in the canopies of trees.

Baby orangutans have a huge advantage when it comes to climbing, as they can hold on "like an octopus", says Dr Preuschoft.

"I think the orangutans were really completely thrilled when they realised that they could actually be high in the tree canopy together with one of their moms," she adds.

As soon as the rescued orangutans have moved out of quarantine, they spend long hours in the forest in as natural an environment as possible. They are taught essential forest survival skills in a large forested area between the cities of Balikpapan and Samarinda.

 

Dr Signe Preuschoft and her team are passionate about rehabilitating orphaned baby orangutans

The aim is to provide sanctuary to illegally captured or directly threatened orangutans, as well as to rehabilitate orphaned orangutans, with the goal of releasing them back into the wild.
Only about 50,000 Bornean orangutans are left in the world, with numbers plummeting over the last 70 years. Loss of rainforest to oil palm plantations or coal mining leads orangutans into conflict with humans.
Orphans are snatched from their dead mothers and are sold or held illegally as pets. Why do we wait until a species is seriously endangered before we do anything to help them?



History Made As Ocean Cleanup Successfully Collects First Plastic From The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Pacific garbage patch


Cleanup is underway
 

 

In the Pacific ocean, North East of Hawaii, there exists a giant whirlpool of plastic debris that’s accumulated by the ocean currents. It’s referred to as the North Pacific Gyre, but also commonly referred to as “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” It’s one of the largest ecosystems on Earth, made up of millions of square kilometers. The Great Garbage Patch is approximately the size of Queensland, Australia, where an enormous amount of plastic is spread throughout the ocean.

Plastic pollution in our oceans is obviously one of the biggest issues our planet faces today. We must clean up our planet, and we must do it now. Plastic pollution has also created microplastic pollution ( very tiny particles of plastic). Microplastics are a huge problem, and microplastic contamination is now extremely widespread. More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tons, are floating in the world’s oceans. Data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand suggests a minimum of 5.25 tons of plastic particles exists in the oceans, most of them being microplastics measuring less than 5mm.

All living beings within the ocean are also suffering from microplastic pollution. The good news is  that the contraption in the video is also harvesting microplastics. This is why it was so encouraging when I came across news showing that after one year of testing, The Ocean Cleanup organization announced this week that their System 001/B vessel is capturing and collecting plastic debris in this area of the ocean, and doing so successfully. The system uses natural forces of the ocean to catch the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a principle behind the cleanup that was first presented by the creator, Boyan Slat back in October 2012.

The patch, again, is very large, representing a huge piece of trash that’s drifting halfway between California and Hawaii.

 

After discovering the patch in the 90s, scientists said it would take thousands of years to clean it up—but Slat quickly made a name for himself after he presented a TEDx talk in which he claimed that he could do it in less than ten, if he could get his special machinery built.

Though his claim caused many skeptics to raise their eyebrows, Slat dropped out of college so he could bring his plans to life. In addition to crowdfunding $2.2 million for his idea, he garnered millions more dollars through interested investors.

 

Now, the System 001/B vessel—which launched from Vancouver in June—is The Ocean Cleanup’s second attempt to prove its concept of collecting garbage from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In addition to collecting plainly visible pieces of plastic debris, as well as much larger ghost nets associated with commercial fishing, System 001/B has also successfully captured microplastics as small as 1 millimeter—a feat which the organization was pleasantly surprised to achieve.

 

It’s great to see so many young people with the desire to change the world. Often when one has such a desire, it’s easy to feel like you’re not making an impact. There are many avenues one can take to help create a positive change on this planet in the form of action, awareness, or other avenues that exist. The more people with the desire to see change and with the desire to help, the better our world will continue to be.
Yes, there is opposition from powerful people with enormous resources, who have been partly responsible for the pollution and resulting climate change we have experienced. Imagine what these people, the financial elite, with all of the billions/trillions they have, could do, if they wanted to be a positive force in saving our planet.