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"Figurine Anthropomorphique de Juodkrantė" (copie) par Vytautas Galdikas (1967) présentée à l'exposition “Palanga Amber Museum" du “Lithuanian Art Museum” présentée en ligne sur Google Arts & Culture, mars 2020.

#expos #mineral #ambre #inspirations bijoux #sculpture #Galdikas #LithuanianArtMuseum #GoogleArts&Culture

Leakey’s Trimates and the Borneo Orangutan

Over a ten year period starting the 1950s, the great Kenyan paleo-anthropologist Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey cast about to find assistants to conduct field work. He first found Jane Goodall, who began studying chimpanzees in Kenya in 1958. Next, Dian Fossey was dispatched to Rwanda to study mountain gorillas after spraining her ankle and vomiting on one of Leakey’s excavations. Finally, Lithuanian grad student Birutė Marija Filomena Galdikas atttended a lecture by Leakey at UCLA where she was studying and convinced him to send her to Borneo to study orangutans. Collectively the three were known as Leakey’s Trimates (a pun on primates) or Leakey’s Angels, a reference to the American television show Charlie’s Angels. Although she is the least known of Leakey’s Trimates, Galdikas has contributed greatly to the understanding of orangutan ecology.

Galdikas studied the Borneo orangutan, given the binomial Pongo pygmeaus by Carl Linneaus. But first, the word orangutan came into English in 1691 (as ourang-hutan) from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning a person and hutan meaning the forest, thus forest-people. Early accounts said that these creatures could talk, but preferred not to, under the fear that they would be pressed into servitude The name pongo comes from the stories of an English sailor Andrew Battell, who was imprisoned in Angola and described what he called two anthropoid monsters named Pongo and Eneco. The word pygmeaus comes from the Latinized Ancient Greek word πυγμαιος (pygmaios) of the same spelling meaning dwarf, as the Borneo orangutan was much smaller than the other great apes with which it was originally classified. The Borneo orangutan shares 97% of its DNA with humans.

Oh, Happy Independence Day, Lithuania!

Image of Pongo pygmeaus courtesy Dennis Church, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

#orangutan #galdikas #leakey #goodall #fossey #primates #biology #science #greek #latin #women in STEM #lithuania

Her early years were spent under a thatch roof hut in one of the wildest corners of the planet. Eyes constantly peeled for poachers and leeches alike, Biruté Mary Galdikas quickly got used to her surroundings in the Bornean rain forest, where she has resided for most of the past four decades to study orangutans.

Life has changed considerably since Galdikas’s early days as a pioneer of orangutan study and conservation—her small bastion in the forest has developed into one of the top orangutan rehabilitation centers in the world, and, like Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, Galdikas is a foremost expert in her field.

WWF Travel: You’ve described the situation facing orangutans as “catastrophic.” How do you stay motivated to continue with your work? Biruté Mary Galdikas: When I stay at my home in the forest at Camp Leakey, I see the results of the rehabilitation and release work I began 41 years ago. I see orangutans that we released 40 years ago still alive and living good lives in the wild. I am reminded that all the orangutan orphans currently under our care deserve the same tranquility and freedom that these orangutans at Camp Leakey now have. This motivates me to continue our work to ensure that all the orangutans under our care will eventually return to the wild.

WWF: Have you found that people’s opinions about orangutans have changed over the years? BG: When I first started my work, most people had no idea how orangutans were different from the other great apes or even monkeys. People thought orangutans lived in Africa and had black hair. Many thought they were a type of gorilla!

Now, in Indonesia specifically, people are much more aware of orangutans and their need for forest, as well as the Sumatran species’ status as critically endangered. In North America, virtually every educated person knows about orangutans. Ironically, Clint Eastwood’s movies [1978’s “Every Which Way But Loose” and its 1980 sequel “Any Which Way You Can”] with “Clyde” were very helpful in this regard!

WWF: You often either escort or meet with visitors to Camp Leakey. Why do you think it’s important to be personally involved in this way? BG: Camp Leakey is the one place on the planet where great apes and people are totally equal! It is an inspirational place that ignites people’s imaginations and allows them to go on spiritual journeys of their own. I always like to meet visitors to hear where they are from, to understand their interests in orangutans, and their motivations in coming to see Camp Leakey. I feel proud of having created Camp Leakey and privileged to be able to share it with visitors.

WWF: What do you think most surprises visitors who come to Camp Leakey? BG: What surprises and even shocks visitors is that the orangutans are so big. One male, Tom, weighs over 300 pounds! And that interactions with the orangutans seem perfectly natural. An orangutan female with her infant walks a few feet away from you, the human visitor, and gives you barely a glance—as though it was the most normal thing for a human being to be sharing her forest habitat in the middle of Central Kalimantan.

WWF: If there was one take-away you want people who visit Camp Leakey to come away with, what would it be? BG: Orangutans need the forest. If we continue to allow the destruction of their rain forest homes, orangutans as populations in the wild will disappear within the next 20 years! Solitary, isolated orangutan individuals will continue to survive, possibly even decades, after the wild populations have been decimated since orangutans have been known to live over 60 years of age. But orangutans as forces of nature and as populations in the wild will be long gone.

#orangutan #galdikas #OFI #conservation #environment #anthropology #primatology #primates

Leakey's Angels

(From left: Biruté Galdikas, Jane Goodall, and Dian Fossey)

These three women were hand selected by the anthropologist Louis Leakey to study the behaviours of orangutans, chimpanzees, and mountain gorillas for the purpose of uncovering the relationship between primates and the environment. Although Leakey was specifically interested in tying their observations to human evolution, these women were pioneers in their fields, uncovering vast amounts of information regarding great ape behaviour and ecology. By the time of Leakey's death, Goodall and Fossey had conducted massive amounts of research in Gombe and the Virunga mountains, while Biruté Galdikas was just beginning her work in Indonesia. A fourth researcher, Toni Jackman, was also planning to leave for the purpose of research into bonobo behavioural ecology, but inadequate funding resulted in her being unable to leave.

These women are marvels of primatology - brave, intelligent, and committed to conservation, even to the point of death in the case of Fossey. Their work has shaped our understanding of our own evolution as well as the evolution of our closest relatives. They are truly inspiring!