The Rainforest: a place full of amazing.

Why is rainforest biodiversity so special, and why do so many plants and animals call it their home?

In the last two years, I’ve had the privilege of visiting two of the great tropical rainforests of the world: the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Bornean rainforest. I consider it a privilege, because the majority of people in the world never set foot inside of a rainforest. 50% of the world population live in cities, and that number is projected to jump to 70% during the next 35 years. The tropical rainforest is just about the last place the average human would want to venture into, and it’s not that hard to see why. It’s almost impossible to live in it.

Somewhere hidden between all those leaves and branches are countless species of insects, and other animals, invisible to our eyes. 

When western explorers first ran into the rainforests of the Amazon, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and saw the immensely dense growth and all of the gigantic trees, they concluded that the soils there must be the most fertile on earth. Counter to intuition however, the soils there are some of the most nutrient poor on earth. This is because nutrient cycling is incredibly fast in the rainforest, and any nutrients that make it into the soil are immediately absorbed by the roots of all the plants and taken up into the canopy. In fact, 99% of the nutrients of the rainforest is found in the vegetation itself, and not the soils. So any crops one tries to plant in the rainforest will surely fail.

Other than the puny human (try to spot the climber up there!), within those trees are a whole lot of nutrients. 

If that wasn't enough of a deterrent to any would-be residents of the rainforest, the rainforest is also an incredibly dense and arguably one of the most difficult to navigate environments in the world. There are few landmarks, and the trees are so high and the vegetation so dense that one can’t see more than 50m into the distance. It’s no coincidence that the word “jungle,” which is of sanskrit origin, means wasteland.  Without sufficient training, equipment, and supplies, a trip alone into the rainforest would end in disaster for the average person. Our primate ancestors called the rainforest their home, but ever since humans evolved their way into the savannas of Africa, few have ventured back into their ancestral home. We just can’t live in it.

Funnily enough though, in the grand scheme of things, humans seem to be the great outlier in terms of where we live. Covering less than 2% of the earth’s surface, the rainforest nevertheless contains more than 50% of the world’s species of plants and animals. More and more are discovered every day. And not just small things like insects (like the plant hopper!) or plants (like this crazy Chilean chameleon vine – technically not in the rainforest but too cool to not share). Mammals have been discovered as well, as shown by the recent discoveries of the Olinguito in the Amazon, and the venomous Slow Loris in Borneo (the only known venomous primate in the world!). Considering all of the life that’s out there, it’s crazy to think that many scientists estimate that only one fifth of the world’s species have been described. Even how the rainforest became so biodiverse is kind of a mystery, and there’s a multitude of theories proposed to explain it. One of the reasons given is that the environment is so heterogeneous and complex (to begin with, there is a vertical element not seen in other environments to the extent as it’s seen in the rainforest, which has trees 200+ft) that there are thousands of potential niches for different animals to occupy, and speciate.

The golden-mantled tree kangaroo, recently discovered in the Foja mountains of Indonesia. I didn't even know there were kangaroos on this side of Wallace's line!

So with all of this biodiversity in the rainforest, you might think that if you walk into the rainforest, you’ll be running into all sorts of animals left and right. The truth is not quite that however. With all those impressive biodiversity facts and species numbers I always heard about, the first time I visited the Amazon rainforest in the fall of 2012, I was expecting to run into all sorts of crazy animals the minute I walked out. So you can imagine my surprise when I found the rainforest to appear overwhelmingly uniform. And to the untrained eye, that’s exactly what it looks like: one big pile of green. Broccoli broccoli broccoli, everywhere. Out in the open, there are no animals in sight or anything besides bunches of of branches, vines, and leaves. You might spend a few days in the rainforest, and then leave thinking “alright, I think I saw all there is to see.” But in actuality, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

To get the most out of the rainforest, and experience the biodiversity that it has to offer, it takes a lot of patience, and a very observant eye. You know for a fact that everything is out there because your ears don’t lie. You can hear the call of the wild every morning and every night, when multitudes of species in the rainforest – cicadas, gibbons, birds, etc. – call out and resonate throughout the rainforest. But everything, absolutely everything is hiding. Under leaves, blending into the cracks of tree trunks, high up in the canopy, almost every form of life out there blends into its surroundings, and appears invisible to those who don’t know where to look. But it The longer you spend in the rainforest, the better you’ll be at spotting everything. It’s not ‘til then that you realize you could spend every hour of every day walking around in the rainforest, and not see everything. Even the big things! I have spent almost a year now living at Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, and I’ve yet to see any sun bears, leopards, pythons, or lemurs. But they are out there, and I’m still holding out hope that I’ll at least get to see a bear before I leave!

If I act like a sun-bear, maybe all the sun-bears will come out too.

It takes a bit of luck to see cool things out here, some of which I’ve had during my time at Gunung Palung. I’ve definitely seen over 15 orangutan matings now (so many that I’ve lost count!), which tend to be pretty rare events to see, much less capture on film (which I also have!). I’ve also seen two male orangutans go at it head to head on the ground, extremely rare events to witness. My most notable sighting, and the source of a bit of jealousy at camp, was when a Binturong (AKA, a bearcat!) ran up to me as I was sitting somewhere up in the mountain; I heard a noise coming down hill, and prepped my camera, unknowing of what exactly was coming down but ready to get it on film. I got really excited when I saw what it was, but it passed by me so quickly that I could only capture a moving blur on the camera. But the ‘cat’ in the bearcat was a curious creature indeed, and when it spotted me it turned around for a closer look. As it stared at me from a few meters away, I managed to snap this photo, proof of my sighting to everyone at camp!

A Binturong, AKA a Bearcat. I bet there are only a handful of non-camera trap photos in the world taken of these guys in the wild. 

Every time you step into the rainforest, what you see is luck of the draw, a spin of the wheel. But with some patience and a good eye, you can double the odds. The rainforest can definitely be a bit overwhelming, but it is without a doubt an awesome place to explore. 

What is an orangutang? I don't know, because this post is about orangutans.

Before I begin:  I’ve been away from working on this blog for a while. I started writing this next series of posts a couple months ago, but I just never posted them. I’ve been busy up at camp and 

have had to shift my efforts elsewhere. My time here for the last year has been great . I’m not going to be here forever though, and I don’t want to leave without sharing my experiences with all of you. So I’m going to work extra hard to get at least one post out a week. But moving on…

If you’re reading this, you’re probably well aware that we’re all about orangutans here. So here’s a question…what is an orangutan? A simple question perhaps, but when it comes to simple questions, the answers are rarely as simple or as obvious as we think. As an example, ‘why is the sky blue?’ is a simple question, but to answer it you have to go neck deep into the physics of light and refraction…which means that for most of human history, a simple fact that every 

person who ever lived has been well aware of (that the sky is blue) could not be truly explained until the last 100 years.  

‘What is an orangutan?’ is a rather open-ended question, and has answers on a multitude of levels. So let’s start with something basic: what does the word even mean? Well first of all, the spelling. It's not orangutang. That's just a weird word some redneck said one day, and it somehow spread enough that a lot of people think it's how you spell and/or say orangutan. Actually, it might even be because of that fake juice drink that is supposed to taste like oranges, but really just tastes like like sweat, sugar, and food coloring mixed together. I'm talking about you, Tang. You remember the commercials in the 90s right? A bunch of orangutans running around wearing clothes, sunglasses, and  drinking fake orange juice? I think some unclever guy in their advertising department was trying to think of a name for a new orange drink, and thought "Orange? ORANGEutangs? I got i! TANG!" Uh. No, buddy. There's no G in there. Now nobody knows how to say orangutan. Thanks Tang.

Actually word ‘orangutan’ comes from the Indonesian/Malay words “orang” (person) and “hutan” (forest). So 

orangutan means “person of the forest”. Note that this is why we call the orangutans at Cabang Panti OHs.  So even before the theory of evolution was introduced, or before Alfred Russell 

Wallace came to the Malay archipelago and provided the first full description of orangutans to science, the native Indonesian/Malay people recognized the great similarity in appearance between orangutans and people. Today, we know why we’re so similar: Both humans and 

orangutans are apes, and we share a common ancestor and 97% of our DNA with them.  A word on apes: don’t call them monkeys, unless you want every primatologist within a 15-mile radius 

to track you down and give you a rant about the differences between apes and monkeys. Simply put, apes are a group of primates with upright postures, stiff lower backs, and (most importantly) 

big brains for their body size. If you want a quick and dirty way to distinguish apes from monkeys, well monkeys have tails and apes don’t. Other apes include chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, gibbons, and (of course) humans (no disrespect to gibbons, which are classified as lesser apes rather than great apes, because they’re smaller and more distantly related). 

There’s two species of Orangutans: The Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii) and the Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). The bornean species is further divided into several subspecies, 

depending on where the population is found on the island. The orangutans at Gunung Palung are classified as Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii, and these are found in most of central Kalimantan as 

well. The Sumatran Orangutan is found only in Sumatra (I know, plot twist!). While both species of orangutans are endangered, the Sumatrans are listed as critically endangered, because they 

have an incredibly small population. 

There’s a few differences between the two species: Sumatran orangutans are a bit larger in body size, and seem to have a slower life history than Bornean orangutans (e.g., they take longer to 

mature and have offspring less frequently, among other differences). This may be part of the reason that Sumatran orangutans are more endangered, since their life history may make their 

populations slightly more vulnerable to hunting and habitat destruction. The Sumatran species almost rarely comes down to the ground, whereas the Bornean ones do so periodically. There is 

little danger in coming down to the ground for Bornean orangutans, but the ones in Sumatra have a big problem to worry about: the fierce Sumatran tiger! It’s a risk coming down to the ground 

for them, because there might just be a hungry beast waiting for his lunch to climb down the tree – this may account for this behavioral difference among the Bornean and Sumatran orangutans. 

Those are just a few of the differences between both species. But what makes orangutans different from all of the other apes? That’s what I’ll be talking about in the next post. 

Close Encounters of the Ape Kind

It's 4:30am. Under a moonless sky, the forest sleeps silently, and the serene silence and vaccuum of darkness is broken only by the sounds of leaves crackling beneath our boots and the spots of light on the forest floor illuminated by our headlamps. 

Jenn, Caitlin, and I were on the search for a group of night nests, made the night before by a group of the orangutans: Bibi, her young daughter Barani, and big flanged male Codet. By the time we made it to the location of the nests, it was still as dark as dungeon...the only things visible were the sillhoutes of the leaves and branches above, and the ground beneath us gowing with the red lights from our headlamps. Red light bothers the orangutans less than the normal white light, and the last thing we wanted was to wake them up before they wished (because we all know how that feels). We sat down quietly beneath the tree, and turned off our lights. It was so dark that if I held my hand up in front of my face, I would 't be able to see them. Now were just waiting for their awakening.

We didn't have to wait long. Suddenly, I hear the crackling of branches breaking loudly above, and feel a great mass moving in the tree. Codet, the big male, had awoken. Within seconds, he lets out a reverberating series of grunts, finally climaxing into a sequence of long, deep notes of bellowing hoos. 

I had never seen nor heard an orangutan before, not even at a zoo. And now there I was, standing less than 15 feet under this huge beast in the dark, in the middle of the rainforest. And I felt his power. My first thought, more excited than scared, was "holy shit." 

I can't remember which author, but I heard someone once say that the scariest thing in the world that you can write about is not ghosts, monsters, murderers, giant spiders, or anything like that. It's a locked door. Because what's behind that locked door can be anything. It's not knowing what's behind that brings the suspense. 

I'm not saying that Orangutans are scary. But I think the sentiment I felt when standing under that tree was the same as that door analogy. It was dark, I couldn't see anything, but in my mind I knew there was this huge beast standing above me. The suspense as I started hearing those branches begin to break was insane, as this unknown beast of an animal, which I had no idea what it was like, was beggining to materialize into my existence, and become real. Those evolved behavioral responses for self-preservation, the physical responses to what we call fear, start kicking in, and your heart starts pumping, you begin to feel extremely alert, and the hair on your arms begin to stand up. It's just a powerful instinct that we can't avoid. And when those other-worldly sounds of his long call reached my ears, I felt him so huge and so close that I couldn't help but feel powerless in its presence. 

That was my first encounter with an Orangutan. In fact, that was my first time seeing an ape in the wild (besides the boring old ones like the ones reading this blog). Since the, I've seen many more orangutans, but that moment I will remember forever. 

River Ride to the Rainforest

The sun hadn’t yet risen, and I was already lurking around my temporary home in Ketapang, a small town in Western Borneo. It was 4am, and I could already hear the Ramadan dawn prayer chants resonating throughout the town. In just one hour, I needed to be ready to load my few belongings into the truck that would drop our group of five at the small village where we would begin our 8-hour river journey into the rainforest. After a quick breakfast and a few goodbyes over the internet, I headed out the door to meet up with my companions for the trip: BU Anthropology professor Cheryl Knott, National Geographic photographer Tim Laman, and their children Russell and Jessica. As I loaded myself into the truck, a fact hit me: it would be my last time in civilization for at least a few months.

The road to the village was long, but the change in scenery as I left the city of Ketapang was as striking as it was pleasant. The cities in Indonesia aren’t very keen on including much green in their city planning, and it was nice to see trees and grass around me for once. We were driving on a narrow road that tried but clearly failed to accommodate the two lanes it was supposed to have, as we had to sway to the side every time a car or a motorcycle came in the opposite direction. The residents here live a simple life in fragile-looking shacks with moss-covered planks and aluminum roofs. A lot of people were just sitting on their porch, enjoying the fresh morning air. As we made it further into our journey, the houses became fewer and farther between, until they were completely replaced by flatlands and rice-paddies. By mid-morning, we had made it to the village. We stopped at the house of a man named Udin. We had hired some of his sons to paddle us upriver in sampans, all the way into the heart of the rainforest of Gunung Palung National Park. We had a problem however: the four sampans were too small and too few to take both ourselves and all of our baggage. We decided to leave some of our less important bags behind, which would be paddled upriver in a few days. After a bit of organizing, we boarded the small and shaky canoe-like boats.

We were off. After paddling through the rest of the village and being greeted by some river by- standers, our river guides turned on some very loud home-rigged motors strapped onto the back of the boats. The increase in pace from paddle-speed to motor-speed however, justified having such a loud device constantly broadcasting its mechanical noises throughout the river. We made our way through various changes of scenery: secondary forest, logged forest, rice paddies, and swamps. On the way, I saw strange new fruits, birds, butterflies, and even some macaques up in the trees. After a few hours, we made it to the thick cover of jungle, which was a nice relief from the powerful and burning sun we were exposed to for large part of our trip. After a nice dip in the water and a quick lunch of dried blocks of indomie (the Indonesian version of ramen-noodles), we continued through the thick forest on the narrow and winding stream between the green, luscious, collection of trees. We were forced to get off the boat and push on a few parts of our trip, as the water levels were too low on some parts of the stream for the sampan to get through unassisted by pushing from human hands, and I discovered that there are little fishes that nibble at your feet while you’re in the water...which is a nice alternative to the dozens of spiders that get on you every time your face smacks into leaves and branches hanging over the river.

I had heard stories from Tim and Cheryl earlier about instances where they had barely made it halfway to the research station before having to get out and push the boats. If something like this occurred, it might mean making it to the end sometime in the early AM, or perhaps even after sunrise. Luckily, the water levels were as nice as they get, and minimal pushing was needed. We ended up making really great time. We had been previously told by Udin that we would make it to the station by 9pm, but at our current pace we were set to get there around 6:30pm. Sure enough, by 6pm we were getting closer to our jungle home. Cheryl pointed out some trees with red trunks to me: a sign that we were close. I began to see a light flickering in the distance. As it moved closer, my eyes began to construct an image of Cabang Panti: 15 feet above the river and stretching from river-bank to river-bank, was a wooden suspension bridge...the kind that you might see in an Indiana Jones movies (you know, the kind that stretches over a huge precipice with hungry alligators waiting for bad-guy meat in the river below). Beneath it, and poking out into the water, was a small dock held in place by a set of wooden stairs that led up to the riverbank. There, covered by the shadows and silhouettes of the nearby trees, was the lab bulding: a two-story structure suspended on a series of stilts that sunk into the exposed patch of dirt beneath it.

We had made it. Upon arrival, we were greeted by the only people around: camp-manager Jenn, BU grad-student Caitlin, and a French researcher named Sylvain. Since the usual Cabang Panti staff were on their vacation for Idolfitri, they had planned to make dinner for us by the time we got there. We had surprised them by our early appearance at camp though, but dinner was soon underway a few minutes after our disembarkment. As you might imagine, a block of indomie doesn’t cut it for a full day river journey into the jungle, and I was starving.

After a refreshing bath in the river to offset the typical hot and humid jungle weather, and to remove the jungle-funk I had accumulated during my sweaty full-day boat ride, I settled into my tent with a belly full of food and a heart full of adventure.

Day one in the Jungle: Check.

Busy times at Cabang Panti

So it's been two weeks since I arrived to Cabang Panti research station (FYI: the Indonesian 'C' sounds like the /ch/ sound in English. So it's actually pronounced "Chabang Panti"). 

Before I get into details, a sidenote: As any rational person might predict, rainforests don't come equipped with wi-fi (except maybe a particular fancy-schmancy research station in Ecuador...ahem, Tiputini). Given this technical limitation induced by living in the middle of nowhere, I am left no option but to write any blog updates on my phone, and email them to the blog page sans pictures. So if there's a reason I haven't done any updates in the last couple weeks, that's a big one.

The other big reason? I've been out in the field following orangutans almost every waking hour. The small remainder of my non-orangutan-following time has been spent doing domestic chores around camp. It's been particularly busy for us because it's a special time of year in Indonesia. Typically, there are Indonesian assistants that do most of the Orangutan following and camp chores like cooking and cleaning. But they have been away the past couple weeks because they were on Idolfitri, their end-of-ramadan vacation (Indonesia is the country with the 4th largest muslim populatiom in the world). This is basically like christmas break for them. Given our shortage of man-power, all of the responsibilities have fallen on a handul of western researcher, including myself. Which means virtually zero time for things like posting updates.

But Idolfitri is over, and camp is back to normal. So here I am. The last two weeks have been crazy, but I've seen some amazing things that I will enjoy sharing very much, now that I have time to write about it. Lots of updates coming soon.