The news that a new species of orangutan has been discovered — if “discovered” is quite the right word — is both wondrous and troubling.

Wondrous, because it reminds us that, even in 2017, seeming miracles can and do happen. It’s a reminder of both the resilience of nature and the fallibility of science and humankind, in that such a large mammal — and a primate species at that — can elude detection for so long.

Troubling, though, because yet another creature has been added to the IUCN list of Critically Endangered species, the official designation for animals that are not just in trouble but in serious trouble. Just 800 remain of the Tapanuli orangutan, as it’s being called. Tapanuli is the central rainforest region in Sumatra where those remaining apes cling to life, even as Indonesian developers — legal and illegal — are hidebound determined to burn their forest to the ground, all in the name of palm oil plantations.

But wait, it gets worse. Acting on the notion that what the world really needs is more hydroelectric power dams, Indonesia is in the process of constructing a monster dam that will finish the job the land developers have started, if they have their way.

Naturally, conservation groups, advocates for nature and assorted NGO’s are scrambling to save the rainforest by any means possible, but as the Amazon Basin has shown, petitions and public protests are no match for armed militias willing to burn, loot and murder to do their paymasters’ bidding. Corrupt politicians and land developers get their way every time, and so the Tapanuli orangutan faces uphill odds, even though it’s only now been identified as a separate species.

What constitutes a specific species, as opposed to a subspecies or distant cousin, is a technical branch of zoology, ably explained by National Geographic’s Jason Goldman in a story posted earlier this week. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/new-orangutan-species-sumatra-borneo-indonesia-animals/)

The accompanying photos, by the way — a couple of which appear here — were taken by veteran primate photographer Tim Laman for National Geographic Creative, a digital branch of the National Geographic Society’s tree-of-life. Laman is not new to this: He won last year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award for his image of an orangutan climbing a tree towards his remote-controlled camera placed high in the sky, the rainforest spreading out below.

Scientists are cautious by nature. They’re not inclined to jump to conclusions until a new find has been subjected to peer review. The “discovery” is not technically new; the orangutans in question where first reported to exist following an expedition into the remote mountain forests of Sumatra in 1997. A research project devoted the intervening years to unlocking the apes’ genetic code, to determine whether or not the species was genetically different from the two species already known to exist, the Sumatran and Bornean orangutan.

This is unglamorous work, involving long hours of poring over electron microscopes and DNA-testing computers — not like tramping through virgin jungle in person, like a latter-day Professor Challenger in a post-modern update on Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lord World. The discovery is only coming to light now because the study, authored by researchers from University of Zurich and Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, in conjunction with the wildlife NGO Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (https://sumatranorangutan.org), published their work in the latest issue of the scientific journal Current Biology.

If the find is still determined to be true years and decades from now, the Tapanuli orangutan will go down in history as the first new great ape to be identified as such in nearly a century.

In the shorter term, though, the Tapanuli orangutan’s greatest contribution to conservation and the fight to preserve what remains of nature, will be that it has forced the plight of Indonesia’s rainforest — and rainforests in general — into the mainstream media, however briefly, from BBC World News to USA Today, from Radio New Zealand to the Hindustan Times, from The Independent to India Today.

In this case, all publicity is good publicity, where survival of a species is concerned.

As the study’s co-author, Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool’s John Moores University since 2012, told the BBC: “It’s . . . worrying, to discover something new and then immediately also realize that we have to focus all our efforts before we lose it.”

Joel Sartore, born June 16, 1962 in Ponca City, Oklahoma near the Arkansas River, is a 20-year contributor to National Geographic magazine.

Arguably, though, none of his projects — not his 1993 story on the trail of ruin left by Hurricane Andrew, not his 2003 story on B.C.’s embattled Clayoquot Sound, not even his self-explanatory 2009 story “Vanishing Amphibians” — can hold a candle to the substance, scope and potential significance of the Photo Ark, an A-to-Z portrait record of critically endangered species that are still with us.

Since October, 2013 Sartore has labouriously tracked down living specimens of critically endangered animals — sadly, nearly all of them in zoos, aviaries and botanical gardens — and photographed them the way Annie Liebovitz might, in solo poses, against a plain backdrop that forces the eye to focus on the subject and nothing else.

Sartore’s passion for nature was kindled when he was a child, when he learned about the last passenger pigeon from one of his parent’s Time-Life photography books. Last year, he had a brief cameo in the film Racing Extinction, photographing the last known Rabb’s fringe-limbed tree frog (Ecnomiohcyla rabborum) at the Atlanta Botanical Grounds in January, 2013.

That frog, which Sartore dubbed “Toughie,” has since passed away. It was the last of its kind.

Over a lifelong career in journalism and nature photography, Sartore has contributed to Audobon Magazine, GEO, Sports Illutsrated, Newsweek, and, bringing his life’s calling full circle, Time-Life, but it’s his National Geographic work that has made his name.

And it’s the Photo Ark, for all the right reasons — and wrong reasons — that will stand the test of time. “No matter its size, each animal is treated with the same amount of respect and affection,” Sartore explains on the National Geographic Society’s main web site. “The results are portraits that that are not just stunningly beautiful, but also intimate and moving.”

Sartore’s efforts have seemed especially relevant in recent days with the discovery — and concerns — that snow leopards and common leopards have been found sharing the same territory for the first time, owing to pressures from climate change and human expansion.

In North America, red foxes are now commonly seen in territories previously occupied by Arctic foxes. Rival predators don’t get along: They compete for food and so invariably the less adaptive of the two dies out. By definition, that favours the invasive species, not the endemic species. It’s an invasion that snow leopards, like Arctic foxes, may not be able to stop.

The snow leopard report was followed just hours later by a New York Times story that suggests most of the world’s remaining primates are threatened by extinction in the wild, according to a recent scientific study by 31 primatoglosists that, like the Photo Ark, is unprecedented in its scope.

“The typical nature photograph shows a butterfly on a pretty flower,” Sartore has said. “The conservation photograph shows the same thing, but with a bulldozer coming at it in the background.”

Sartore made that comment to conservation writer Jaymi Heimbuch on the Mother Nature Network’s web site (www.mnn.com) in 2014, in a story headed, “How One Photographer’s Foolishness is Saving Endangered Wildlife.”

The world could use a little more foolishness like that.

http://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo-ark/

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen

Meet ‘Pongo tapanuliensis,’ the first new great ape to be identified in nearly 100 years.

The Photo Ark: critically endangered species’ last stand?

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