orangutans – ZooTab Blog

Endangered Orangutans and Loss of Habitat

Here’s an infographic that I created. I should probably go into more depth about how sever orangutan’s level of endangerment is and how palm oil is a huge contributing factor to it. However, I’ll just let the infographic speak for itself and expound on it at a later time. 🙂

Note: all images are Creative Commons license.

Primates Concept Map

I created this concept map for a project in 2015 and thought it would be a useful addition here, so I updated it with recent data. It overviews primates and shows a view of the relationship between apes and monkeys. One of the most interesting aspects of this is the list of names of all of Woodland Park Zoo’s primates.

I also created a little cheat sheet to carry around in my notebook so that I have the names of WPZ’s primates handy:

Melati’s Favorite Spot

Melati is in the east enclosure with Chinta and Heran. She often prefers to be indoors and can often be found in her favorite spot on a platform at the far right of the enclosure, see below:

I wanted to include a picture of Melati here, but most of the images I have were taken with a pretty bad phone. I’ve tried to get one a few times since creating this post, but they’ve either been bad photos or she was in another area when I was there. Hopefully, I will have better luck in the near future. Or maybe if anyone else has a good pic that they want to share?

A Big Loss

Last week we lost an amazing friend at the zoo, Towan the orangutan. If you’re a regular at the Woodland Park Zoo (WPZ) or just an occasional visitor, you probably interacted with or saw him. I loved his interactions with kids. Adults? Meh, sometimes. But kids often seemed to get his attention. As much as he was a part of the WPZ and the Seattle area, his personality became world-wide famous with the reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise. Actress Karin Konoval used Towan as her inspiration for Maurice in the films.

At 48 years old Towan was the oldest make orangutan in North America. Towan is survived by his twin sister Chinta, daughter Belawan, son Heran, and the mother of Belawan and Heran, Melati.

Does anyone have any thoughts or pictures of Towan to share? I can’t find any good pictures that I’ve taken of him. There is a button to upload a photo in the comments section.