‘Rarest’ ape’s path to survival blocked by roads, dams and agriculture

Even as scientists introduced the world to a new species of orangutan in 2017 — one of only seven non-human great apes alive today — they were already working to pinpoint the threats that might lead to its demise. In a new study published today in the journal Current Biology, a team of scientists reports that road expansion, agricultural conversion and a planned hydropower project could destroy more than one-quarter of the Tapanuli orangutan’s existing habitat. With no more than 800 individuals, the world’s rarest ape species could face extinction not long after we became aware of its existence. “In forty years of research, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this dramatic,” said William Laurance, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in Australia and the team’s leader, in a statement. A male Tapanuli orangutan in the Batang Toru forest. Image by Tim Laman via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). In November, a different group of researchers concluded that orangutans living in the Batang Toru region should be considered a new species, Pongo tapanuliensis. Based on the differences in their behavior, genetics and morphology, the Tapanuli orangutan is distinct from its cousins living in the rainforests of Borneo (Pongo pygmaeus) and elsewhere in Sumatra (Pongo abelii), they argued. Around the same time, Laurance and his colleagues had created detailed maps of the road network across northern Sumatra, including the forests of Batang Toru, part of a broader effort to map both infrastructure projects and targets for conservation across Southeast…

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