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. 

Jungle Problems: Ectoparasites

Let me tell you something about living in the rainforest: You've got to get used to the idea that you are sharing living space with the hundreds of tiny little creatures who live here...They may not charge you rent for letting you live in their home, but there is a price you must pay. The jungle price.

In return for invading their space, all these creatures ask is that you allow them free passage to all the nooks and crannies of your body. Are you in the jungle? Yes? Well congratulations, your body is now a hotel for ectoparasites. There is no avoiding this, and it's just something that you'll accept as a fact of life when you live in the rainforest. 

What are ectoparasites? They're parasites that live on or mooch off the surface of your body. So at least you don't have to worry about parasites being inside you here (on second thought, maybe you do, but at least you won't know you have them.) They parasitize all the local mammals like deer, monkeys, wild pigs, and orangutans. In fact, you can see orangutans scratching themselves all the time because of them, and this is one of the adaptive uses of reciprocal grooming in primates: as in, "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, and we'll both be ectoparasite free." Even though these ectoparasites already have plenty of choice in which species of host to invade, that doesn't mean they're going to ignore humans when they arrive. Quite the opposite: you're just like a walking buffet of fresh meat...an entire microenvironment for their parasitizing pleasure.

Let me give you some examples. I sleep in a tent on the ground here. Inside of it, I lie on a tiny little mattress pad made of cotton. It's no tempur-pedic, but it gets the job done and I've slept decently comfortably on it. One day though, I started waking up in the middle of the night with a terrible itch on one side of the body. I usually disregarded it, and just went back to sleep. I'd still feel itchy in the morning, but it would eventually go away, only to come back the next night after going in my tent to sleep. This went on for a while, and I just dismissed it as normal...my thought process was "ah, whatever..it's probably mosquitos or generic rashes from walking around in the jungle. Who cares." The night before I was set to go down to town for the very first time after having been here for two months though, I decided to inspect my mattress after itchniness woke me up again. I turned on my headlamp inside the tent, and got down real low to get a good look at all the little cracks between the seams that cover the whole surface of the mattress. I'm glad that it was my last night, because what I found out was not pretty. There were hundreds of tiny little ticks and fleas living on the mattress...sleeping with me every single night. They were dug in deep, but poke them and they would move around and find another little crack in the mattress to settle in. No wonder I would wake up in the middle of the night constantly...There were hundreds of little pests violating my body every single night. 

Now, a normal person in a normal situation would probably have left the tent right then and there and found somehwhere else to sleep. But I had to wake up at 4:30am to hike out of the rainforest, so I was like "meh, I want to sleep...and they're mostly on THAT side of the mattress, so I'll just squeeze a bit to the other side." When I got back from my break, I beat the crap out of my mattress with a broom, and evicted all those free-loaders.

Similarly, there's also the story of the tick that lived in my bellybutton. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling something weird in my bellybutton. In a half-awake daze, I would stick my finger in there and feel something inside. I didn't know what it was, but it felt me touching it, because it would  apparently squirm around a bit and make me feel a tiny bit of pain. But I was too tired and dazed to really give a crap and do something about it, so I would just decide to check it in the morning. Except I would always forget. For three nights and three days, the cycle would repeat itself, with me waking up, deciding to check my bellybutton in the morning, and then forgetting to do so. 

Finally, I was eating breakfast one morning and just happened to scratch my belly. The tick squirmed a bit, and I was like "oh yeaaaah, I forgot, I need to check my bellybutton!". Now at this point I didn't know what was in there yet, so when I looked I was very surprised to find a huge tick with a red spot cramped in there, squeezing the folds of my bellybutton real tight. I tried pulling it out with my fingers with no avail, so I got some tweezers and a mirror. I tried playing self-surgeon, but I still couldn't get it out. Then Yadi, one of the indonesian guys here, offered to help. He stuck the tweezers in my bellybutton, grabbed a hold of the tick with the tip, and told me to get ready. Like a little kid that tied his falling milk tooth to a string and attached it to the door so their father could slam it shut and have the tooth come out, I closed my eyes and counted to three. Before I even get to three though, he just yanked it out full force, giving me an split-second 'outie' belly button and a good dose of ouch. 

So yeah...I then threw the half-dead tick into the trees. I hope it still lived so it can tell its friends what happens when they try to mess with me. Ticks and fleas beware.