News
The World’s Rarest Great Ape Is Worse Off Than We Thought
A pair of new studies suggest fewer than 700 Tapanuli orangutans remain after a cyclone tore through Indonesia last year.
By Nicholas Kusnetz
When scientists identified the Tapanuli orangutan as its own species in 2017, it immediately became the world’s rarest great ape. A survey suggested there were fewer than 800 remaining. The animals had already been pushed into a forbidding mountainous territory about the size of Los Angeles in northern Sumatra, and were hemmed in by human settlements, a gold mine and a hydroelectric dam that had just begun construction. The outlook was not good.