Photo via neprimateconservancy.org
Some species have been known to mankind for thousands of years. Others were discovered only some time ago. The Tapanuli orangutan belongs in the second group and was recognised as a distinct kind of great ape only in 2017. But something happened recently, and we had hardly been introduced before we were warned it might not be around for long.
Four days of rain pushed the planet’s greatest ape species to the edge
A few days of catastrophic weather may have erased what little safety margin for the Tapanuli orangutan, the rarest great ape on the planet.A new study says that about 58 of these critically endangered apes were killed when Cyclone Senyar battered the Indonesian island of Sumatra with four days of relentless rain last November. That is roughly 7% of the entire species, and fewer than 800 of them are left in the whole world.What makes the number even harder to take is that it is a cautious estimate. As the researchers behind the study, published in the journal Current Biology, explain, it only counts the apes known to have died in the storm.It does not include the ones that may still die later, as wrecked forest and lost fruit trees leave survivours with less and less to eat.So, could the true loss turn out to be worse?
Orangutan (Representative Image)
The orangutans died brutallyThe study says that the apes drowned, were buried under landslides, or struck by collapsing trees as entire hillsides gave way. Professor Erik Meijaard of Borneo Futures in Brunei, one of the study’s authors, had initially told the BBC in December that the cyclone probably killed around 35 apes. The fuller analysis turned out to be close to double that.Reviewing photographs of a dead orangutan, Meijaard described how even these famously powerful animals are left helpless when a forested slope comes crashing down on top of them.The human cost was huge, too. Cyclone Senyar killed more than 1,000 people, making it Southeast Asia’s deadliest natural disaster of 2025.Humanitarian workers were among the first to sense what had happened to the wildlife. One of them, Deckey Chandra, told the BBC that a spot where the apes once gathered to eat fruit “now seems to have become their graveyard.”The maths is what makes this so frightening.Studies show the Tapanuli orangutan is in real danger of dying out if it loses even 1% of its population a year. This single storm wiped out 58 of them at once, about 7% of the whole species, and roughly 11% of the orangutans living in the area that was hit. That is many times more than the species can take, and researchers say it is simply too big a loss for them to bounce back from.The team says that Cyclone Senyar was an unusual storm. But they also say climate change, caused by human impact, helped make it so severe, and they warn that this kind of extreme rain is likely to happen more often.Jatna Supriatna of the University of Indonesia called the deaths “a devastating demographic shock to the world’s rarest great ape,” as reported by AFP.
