Why is the unspoken logic that if something changed within yourself, you must know what precipitated the change or how the change occured? Why do we assume we are knowable to ourselves? While conscious change, conscious improvement of some aspect of ourselves is undoubtedly at the heart of quite a few of the large changes in ourselves, I think it is awfully presumptuous that we are fully legible to ourselves. It is more comforting to believe, sometimes, that some mysteries need not be understood to be appreciated. That our bodies, that meat sack beyond our conscious selves, melt and shift alongside us and the world we inhabit.
During massive fires in Indonesia, the critically endangered primates' voices provided clues to their overall health.
Bornean orangutans are one of three orangutan species, all critically endangered. They thrive in carbon-rich peat swamp forests on the Indonesian island of Borneo. These habitats are also the sites of massive wildfires.
Indonesian wildfires in 2015 caused some of the worst fire-driven air pollution ever recorded. The fires were driven by an El Niño climatic cycle, which caused especially dry weather in the region.
Compared to other wildfires, peatland fires smolder underground and produce exceptionally high levels of hazardous gases and particulate matter—a leading cause of global pollution-related deaths and illnesses.
Orangutans are well known as an “indicator species” – one that can serve as a proxy for the health of an ecosystem. Changes in their environments often cause conspicuous changes in the apes’ health and behavior. Frequent and persistent exposure to toxic smoke could have severe consequences for orangutans and other wildlife.
Toxic air pollution also poses serious health and safety risks for researchers. However, remote sensing techniques, such as satellite images, GPS data, and acoustic monitoring, are increasingly popular ways to track wildlife populations and see how creatures respond to changes in their environments.
I have studied the behavior, ecology, and acoustic communication of wild primates in Indonesia since 2005. In a new study, my coauthors and I investigated how wild orangutans in Borneo were affected by toxic emissions from Indonesia’s 2015 peatland wildfires—by studying their voices.
Around the world, wildfires are on the rise. They often produce a thick blanket of haze that contains diverse hazardous gases and particulate matter, or PM. Most recently, smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed the U.S. East Coast and Midwest in June 2023, turning skies orange and triggering public health alerts.
Studies have shown that human health risks from wildfire smoke include respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, systemic inflammation, and premature death. Much less is known about how smoke affects wildlife, but in a pair of studies published in 2021 and 2022, scientists at the California National Primate Research Center reported alarming findings.
After less than two weeks of exposure to high concentrations of particulate matter—in particular, ultrafine particles measuring less than 2.5 microns in diameter, which are known as PM2.5—captive rhesus macaques suffered a spike in pregnancy loss. What’s more, surviving fetuses and infants suffered long-term effects on lung capacity, immune responses, inflammation, cortisol levels, behavior, and memory.
During Indonesia’s 2015 fires, Borneo’s air had particulate matter concentrations nearly an order of magnitude higher than the levels in these studies. This made the potential implications for people and wildlife who gasped through Indonesia’s wildfire smoke for nearly two months extremely worrying.
I was studying wild orangutans in the forests of Indonesian Borneo when the 2015 fires started. My colleagues and I at the Tuanan Orangutan Research Station tracked local fires and patrolled nearby hot spots to assess the risk of fire spreading to our research area.
Wearing N95 masks, we continued to monitor orangutans in hopes of learning how the animals were coping with encroaching fires and thick smoke. A few weeks into the fire season, I noticed a difference in the sound of the males’ “long call,” which was the focus of my research.
Long calls are booming vocalizations that can be heard over distances of more than half a mile (1 kilometer). Orangutans are semi-solitary and live in dispersed communities, so these calls serve an important social role. Adult males make them to advertise their prowess to listening females in the area and to scare off any eavesdropping rival males. A couple of weeks after the smoke had appeared, I thought these males sounded raggedy—a little like humans who smoke a lot.
We observed the orangutans for 44 days during the fires, until large blazes encroached on our study area. At that point, we stopped the study to help extinguish the blazes with local firefighting teams and other government and nonprofit groups. Fires burned in our study area for three weeks.
Using data that we collected before, during, and after the fires, I led an analysis of this Bornean orangutan population’s behavior and health. My coauthors and I found that in the weeks after the fires, the apes reduced their activities—resting more and traveling shorter distances—and consumed more calories than normal.
But although they were eating more and moving less, we found by collecting and testing the apes’ urine that they were still burning stored fat—a sign that they somehow were using up more energy. We hypothesized that the cause might be inflammation—the swelling, fever, pain, and fatigue that human and animal bodies experience in response to infection or injury.
Studies have shown that when humans are exposed to particulate matter, they can experience inflammation, both in their respiratory tracts and throughout their bodies. We wanted to know whether inhaling wildfire smoke would cause vocal changes in orangutans, just as inhaling cigarette smoke does in humans.
For this study, my coauthors and I carefully analyzed more than 100 sound recordings of four male orangutans that we followed before and during the fires to measure their vocal responses to wildfire smoke. Research has shown that a suite of vocal features—including pitch, vocal harshness or hoarseness, and shaky voice—reflects the underlying health and condition of both human and nonhuman animals. We were looking for acoustic clues about how this toxic air might be affecting the orangutans.
During the fires and for several weeks after the smoke cleared, these males called less frequently than usual. Normally, orangutans call about six times a day. But during the fires, their call rate was cut in half. Their voices dropped in pitch, showing more vocal harshness and irregularities.
Collectively, these features of vocal quality have been linked to inflammation, stress, and disease—including COVID-19—in human and nonhuman animals.
Increasingly frequent and prolonged exposure to toxic smoke could have severe consequences for orangutans and other animals. Our research highlights the urgent need to understand the long-term and far-ranging effects of peatland fires in Indonesia, which is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world.
By uncovering the linkages between acoustic, behavioral, and energetic shifts in orangutans, our study highlights a way for scientists and wildlife managers to safely monitor the health of orangutans and other animals. Using passive acoustic monitoring to study vocally active indicator species, like orangutans, could unlock critical insights into wildfire smoke’s effects on wildlife populations worldwide.
Wendy M. Erb is a postdoctoral associate in conservation bioacoustics at Cornell University.
Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.
both my closest work friend and my boyfriend are tankies who make fun of me for not being one....should i just let the two of them date instead?? Am I cockblocking two bulldozers from finding true love?
ilove not letting cars gofirst when i cross thestreet like yesi'm have the right ofway, i'ma pedhead, a walkster, a socialburden, a slowbie, &i'm proud too . Go blowup in your little toys or whatever
My favorite sex act is called the 169 where two people engage in reciprocal oral sex and a 3rd person off to the side on the same bed as them lays perfectly still arms across their chest like a vampire and gets a wonderful beautiful nap
we should globally ban the introduction of more powerful computer hardware for 10-20 years, not as an AI safety thing (though we could frame it as that), but to force programmers to optimize their shit better
I reblogged this like 9 times kinda jokingly, but software should be able to run on older and less powerful hardware, and consume less power on newer hardware. Like, this is a real problem imo
I was showing my boyfriend a silly little post on here and he asked if it was my tumblr page. I confidently began to say no, but it faltered before the n transitioned to the o and quite pathetically I put my index finger to the screen to try and block my url. If you've somehow managed to find it, congrats. Hi! I'm falling for you.
it does more harm than good to prop up the myth of the ‘neurotypical’ who completes tasks cheerfully with no issues. this person is a capitalist fantasy. the more you define yourself in comparison to this myth the more you justify social structures staying the same with minor accommodations to the ‘exceptions’ and the continued pathologizing of discomfort under hostile conditions
Sometimes my boyfriend will say things like "please don't look at me with such lovey-dovey eyes, I'm going to drown if you keep doing that" so I just mentally projector slide my favourite fanfic tropes in succession because love should be suffering. I need him to be obsessed with me actually.
Messages To Friends @regretext - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
