A new species of orangutan has been recognized, and it is already threatened by extinction!

Let’s all welcome the newest member of the great apes; the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis). This is the first new member of this family since the bonobo (Pan paniscus) was described in 1929, so this is a very rare event!

A male Tapanuli orangutan. Image by Tim Laman, posted with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

This new orangutan species is found in a forest to the south of Lake Toba on Sumatra island in Indonesia. Their entire range consists of roughly 1,000 square kilometers of tropical and subtropical forest, and at the closest point they are only 100km away from their relative the Sumatran orangutan.

The Tapanuli orangutan is already critically endangered!

Despite having been officially recognized as its own species in November 2017, the Tapanuli orangutan is already considered critically endangered by the IUCN. In fact, the researchers who published the papers with evidence that proposed it to be its own species were working for the IUCN, so they mapped the threat of extinction while learning about the species.

The researchers believe that there are roughly 800 individuals left in the wild jungle, meaning that it is the hominoid species with the fewest number of living individuals. The genetic tests showed some signs of inbreeding, which means that the species is in a bad place already, and we need to act fast if we want to stop their extinction! Hopefully the Indonesian government and GMOs decide to act rapidly on conserving it now that it has been considered a species of its own.

Why the Tapanuli orangutan has not been recognized until now

Up until recently, the Tapanuli orangutans had been considered a subspecies of the Sumatran orangutan, seeing as they live close by each other, and are not all that morphologically different. However, the researchers who studied this population of orangutans did genetic analysis of them, and proposed that they should be considered a species of their own due to the fact that they are genetically different from the Sumatran orangutan. In fact, the Tapanulis seems to be more closely related to the Bornean orangutan, a close relative that is found on a different island! I have written about the Bornean orangutan a few months ago, so click here to check out that post.

Thanks for reading!

It is really exciting that we have found an entirely new species of the great apes, but at the same time it is extremely sad that it’s very close to extinction already. A population of only 800 individuals is extremely low, so I would not be very hopeful of this new orangutan unless the Indonesian government decides to put more pressure on stopping the illegal logging that is happening all over the islands. Anyway, thanks for reading! If you want to learn more about this new orangutan species, check out the paper “Morphometric, Behavioral, and Genomic Evidence for a New Orangutan Species” that was recently published in Current Biology. This is the paper that argues that it should be its own species, and has a lot of information about them!