Orangutan births bolster critically endangered species

“Eight orangutans have been born at US zoos since the beginning of 2025 through the Orangutan Species Survival Plan, a long-standing coordination effort among zoos that aims to maintain a healthy and genetically diverse captive population of the critically endangered ape,” notes The Doomslayer.

Wired reports:

Ruhana—or just ‘Ru’ for short—is one of eight orangutan babies born in a collection of US zoos since the beginning of 2025. For these critically endangered primates, that’s a staggering figure. It’s also not random: The baby boom is the result of a meticulous breeding plan and decades of research to weave a conservation safety net, one birth at a time…

While these new orangutan babies will not be released into the wild, they are a critical part of species conservation. Zookeepers call them ambassadors; when visitors can see the apes, abstract ideas like climate change and deforestation become more real.

But the captive population also has a direct impact on the well-being of wild and rehabilitated populations: Research conducted at AZA zoos on everything from disease management to quality of life is then relayed back to teams in Southeast Asia. Felicity Oram is a conservation practitioner and co-director of OrangJUGA, a Borneo-based conservation organization. Her research on orangutan’s teeth has been critical in the care of young orangutans rescued from the pet trade who live in rehabilitation and rescue centers.

An orangutan used a medicinal plant to heal his injury. “When a wild orangutan in Indonesia suffered a painful wound to his cheek, he did something that stunned researchers: He chewed plant leaves known to have pain-relieving and healing properties, rubbed the juice on the open wound — and then used the leaves as a poultice to cover his injury,” reported NPR.

“This case represents the first known case of active wound treatment in a wild animal with a medical plant,” says biologist Isabelle Laumer,.

An orangutan named Rakus did this in a national park in Indonesia, in its big island of Sumatra. He apparently received the wound in a fight with another male orangutan:

A few days later, he was seen using a plant to treat his injury. The wound then healed, seemingly without any infection….Around a month after applying medicine to his wound, Rakus has fully healed, with only a slightly noticeable scar. This photo was taken roughly two months after the injury was first spotted.

Rakus was spotted with the new wound on June 22, 2022. Three days later, he started eating the stem and leaves of a liana — a vine that researchers say the orangutan population in Suaq rarely eats. From there, his behavior grew increasingly intentional and specific.

Rakus spent 13 minutes eating the plant, and then he spent seven minutes chewing the leaves and not swallowing, instead daubing the plant’s juices onto his wound. When flies began landing on his wound, Rakus fully covered it with leaf material and went back to eating the plant.

Five days later, the wound had closed. Three weeks later, “the wound appeared to have fully healed and only a faint scar remained,” notes a paper by biologists published yesterday in Scientific Reports.

Unlike humans, who often forget to take their prescribed medication, Rakus was a good patient: “the day after he initially applied the leaves, the orangutan found the plant once again and ate more leaves. He also rested much more than usual, which researchers say likely gave his body a better chance to heal.”

A male orangutan groped and kissed a female tourist.

“Conservationists have established a new wild population of Sumatran orangutans in Indonesia. After nearly 200 orangutans were released into the Jantho Pine Forest Nature Reserve, the population is now reproducing naturally, with at least 10 births recorded in the reserve,” reported The Doomslayer.