23/1/06 KOTA KINABALU (Bernama) -- The findings of a three-year genetic study on the orangutan, which was recently conducted in Sabah, showed strong evidence to support that humans have pushed orangutans to the brink of extinction.

This study was jointly conducted by the Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD) with the collaboration of Cardiff University (CU), Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project (KOCP) and Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS).

Other researchers from the Centre National de la Resherche Scientifique (CNRS,France) were also involved in the study which was funded by a grant from the Darwin Initiative for the Survival of Species (United Kingdom).

Wildlife geneticist of Cardiff University, Dr Benoit Goossens, who conducted the "genetic" study, said developing effective conservation and recovery programmes depended on determining when the decline of a population began, its trajectory and the original population size.

"To do so, we collected hair from tree nests, some nearly 30 metres above the ground and faeces found under the nest or near orangutans encountered along the Kinabatangan river," Goossens said in a statement, here Monday.

Goossens said, 200 hundred orangutans were identified using genetic markers called microsatellites and used the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) information to stimulate population history and detect evidence of a population decline.

"We found strong evidence of a population collapse for the orangutans in the fragments of forest of the Kinabatangan Wildlife sanctuary, with a likely time frame within the past hundred years and most likely the last decades- coinciding with deforestation in the region which began in 1890 and accelerated in the 1950s and 1970s," Goossens said.

"All four great apes (orangutans in Asia, chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos in Africa) are threatened with extinction in the near future. This is the first time that a recent and alarming decline of a great ape population which has been brought about by man has been demonstrated, dated and quantified using genetic information," said Goossens.

These findings have been published in the international scientific journal "Public Library of Science (PloS) Biology" this week.

Meanwhile, results of a recent survey by the Sabah Wildlife Department and the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project showed that approximately 11,000 animals still survive in Sabah. "These findings, published earlier this year, also in PLoS Biology, were viewed as good news as it was believed at that time fewer animals were still surviving in the state.

"However we also confirmed that orangutan numbers in the state had been drastically reduced over the past few decades when compared to previous estimate," said Dr March Ancrenaz, who coordinated this general survey.

He said the genetic study showed that there was a high risk of extinction of the orangutan in Sabah in the close future if this decline goes on unabated.

"The major threat to the long-term survival of orangutans in Sabah is linked with oil palm plantation development and forest destruction. Illegal killing also contributes to this decline," according to Ancrenaz.

-- BERNAMA