Borneo’s orangutans are now a critically endangered species due to hunting and destruction of forest habitat, a global conservation group said.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates the number of Bornean orangutans has dropped by nearly two-thirds since the early 1970s and could further decline to 47,000 animals by 2025.
The group said the projected population figure would represent a population loss of 86 percent.
Photo: AP
The assessment for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species was carried out earlier this year and published this week. Previously the species was considered to be endangered.
It said deforestation has dramatically shrunk the primate’s habitat, with about 40 percent of Borneo’s forests lost since the early 1970s and another huge swathe of forest expected to be converted to plantation agriculture in the next decade.
The IUCN estimates between 2,000 and 3,000 of Borneo’s orangutans have been killed every year for the past four decades, mainly for their meat.
“If hunting does not stop, all populations that are hunted will decline, irrespective of what happens to their habitat,” the IUCN said. “These findings confirm that habitat protection alone will not ensure the survival of orangutans.”
Orangutans only live in the wild on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and on Borneo in the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah and Kalimantan, which is the Indonesian part of Borneo.
The Sumatran orangutan has been critically endangered since 2008.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
RSS