Indonesian Borneo Wildfires Endanger Orangutans—and Research Station Dedicated to their Conservation
Boston University biological anthropologist Cheryl Knott has spent decades studying the great apes’ habitat in Borneo and says fires may threaten essential food sources
Life before the fire: An orangutan mother and baby in Gunung Palung National Park; the park, which is experiencing unprecedented forest fires, is home to more than 2,500 of the great apes. © Tim Laman
Indonesian Borneo Wildfires Endanger Orangutans—and Research Station Dedicated to their Conservation
Boston University biological anthropologist Cheryl Knott has spent decades studying the great apes’ habitat in Borneo and says fires may threaten essential food sources
Through a cloud of smoke and ash, the young female orangutan crashes from tree to tree, fleeing a devastating wildfire that’s ravaging the forests of Indonesian Borneo. She’s just 10 meters from the rapidly spreading flames—and not the only one of her species facing a mortal threat.
Fires are currently fanning through one of the island’s most important orangutan habitats, Gunung Palung National Park. They’re also endangering a research station that’s hosted decades of groundbreaking studies by Boston University biological anthropologist Cheryl Knott. Her work has been crucial in advancing understanding and conservation of the great apes.
The national park, 417-square-miles of mangroves, mountains, and forest in western Borneo, is home to one of the biggest remaining populations of wild Bornean orangutans. Since 1992, it’s also been the base camp for Knott’s Gunung Palung Orangutan Project, which is based at the park’s Cabang Panti research station.
“Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world, but it doesn’t get in the news very much. I think it’s important to know that this is a huge disaster,” says Knott, an Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at BU. She worries for the animals she’s spent her career studying and protecting—and for the research hub that aims to safeguard their future. “Ours is one of the longest-running ecological research stations in the world, and so we want to be able to protect that. It’s a real resource for Indonesia, but also, internationally. We’re trying to let people know what’s happening and get outside attention.”
Over more than three decades, her work in the national park and in her lab at BU has shone a light on all aspects of the great apes’ lives, including their growth, reproduction, physiology, and diet. She’s also helped lead a major conservation project, working with Indonesian villagers, government agencies, and other organizations to defend the species and their habitats.
Knott’s team operates at two research stations in Gunung Palung National Park—the long-established main camp, Cabang Panti, and a newer offshoot satellite, Rangkong. The latter is in most immediate danger, with fires burning just 200 meters from its perimeter. Her on-site team has been part of the response effort, including by helping to build fire breaks and providing equipment to firefighting efforts. They’ve also been using their research equipment to monitor the spread of the fires, sending up thermal drones to track the flames. Knott, who’s scheduled to travel to Borneo in a few months, hopes the information can be used to direct aerial firefighting.
Among those supporting the team’s efforts is Knott’s daughter, Jessica Laman (CAS’26), a recent BU graduate who is spending a year at the station as a research volunteer. Together, Knott and her colleagues have established an emergency fund for firefighting efforts.
The Brink spoke with Knott—who’s also a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of biology and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies—about the situation on the ground, how her research has helped advance knowledge about orangutans, and what the fires might mean for the great apes.
Q&A
with Cheryl Knott
The Brink: What’s the current situation?
Cheryl Knott: Our camp, a research station called Rangkong, has now been protected because of fire breaks that our staff have made. But they’re still fighting the fire outside of that on the trail that comes to the research station. The most concerning thing is that the fire is increasing, going up the mountain, which presents real difficulties for fighting that fire.
The Brink: Forest fires have happened before in Borneo. What’s different this time?
Cheryl Knott: We’ve never had forest fires like this. We’ve had some other fires, but they never came into the national park. We don’t expect the primary forest to burn, and so this is a real shock. Normally, primary forests are protected, because they’re very wet, but the fire is going up into what’s really pure primary rainforest; it’s never been logged. That is a big concern.
The scale of the fire is immense. And we’re having this Super El Niño, so there’s no rain in sight. Lots of days of really heavy rain will put these fires out, but we can’t arrange that; we can hope for it, but hope doesn’t save the forest.
The Brink: Can you tell us a little more about the area and its ecological importance?
Cheryl Knott: It’s one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. We have over 250 species of birds; we have gibbons, macaques, clouded leopards, five species of cats. A lot of these animals have big ranges, because they need them—they need to go between different habitats to get food to eat. The animals that do survive [the fires] are potentially going to be competing with each other over resources.
The Brink: Your daughter, Jessica, is in Rangkong. What was she doing before the fires started?
Cheryl Knott: She graduated from BU in May in biology, specializing in ecology and conservation biology. My daughter and my son [Russell Laman (CAS’22)] have been going with us to this research site since they were basically babies and have kind of grown up there. Jessica has always loved it there. I often take volunteer research assistants, usually after college graduation, for a year. I’ve had quite a few BU students who’ve done that and she wanted to do that, too. She’s been following orangutans, learning how to collect data and process samples; she is also leading our laser camera project, a noninvasive way to measure orangutan growth.
The Brink: You’ve been traveling to Borneo for decades. Why are these research stations so important and what are some of the discoveries and insights you’ve been able to make thanks to your time there?
Cheryl Knott: I’ve been working there since 1992. It’s one of the most important research stations in Southeast Asia. We have data on wild orangutans over 30 years, so really looking at these animals over the long term, following individuals across their lifetime; if you do that, you can find out really interesting things. One thing that we and our colleagues have discovered is orangutans only give birth once every eight years—that’s the longest birth spacing of any mammal. Actually, my PhD work was looking at hormones and how diet and energy affect ovarian function.
One of the things the project is known for is developing noninvasive methods—like collecting urine—so we can measure hormones and other biomarkers, allowing us to really look at their physiology and see how that impacts their behavior. One of my recent grad students, Zoe Albert Miller (GRS’26), helped to set up a genetics lab, where we’re actually extracting and measuring DNA there. We also have Samantha Vee (GRS’28), a current grad student who just finished her fieldwork and established a hormone lab.
We also involve the local people—local capacity-building is crucial for long-term conservation in the region.
The Brink: How does your work contribute to orangutan conservation?
Cheryl Knott: There are the research stations, with a staff of maybe 25, and we run a large conservation program with about 30 people. We work with local communities to help them find alternatives to logging, we do education, we help them preserve what we call hutan desa, or village forests. Those are forests where we help local people get legal title to the land, so they can protect it and use it in a sustainable way. About 50 percent of the land area in those village forests has been burned—it’s just so tragic. A lot of that land, too, provides the livelihood for those people, they depend on that. People’s livelihoods have been lost.
The Brink: Orangutan populations in Indonesia have plummeted in the past 75 years and there are already disturbing images emerging from the fires of animals receiving urgent medical attention. What are the potential consequences of these fires for the species?
Cheryl Knott: It’s their habitat—they’re in all those rainforests, including the village forests we support. My daughter saw orangutans just a few meters from the fire, and we’ve seen at least five fleeing the fires. They’re going to be impacted. There’s the immediate concern with health, with respiratory issues. They’re arboreal, so you could imagine they’d be in the trees, they’d be confused, things are falling down, it’s not safe to travel on the ground, so you could have them isolated in a tree where it’s burned all around.
Later on, what are they going to eat? How are they going to survive if there’s not enough food? We have detailed studies of food availability—it’s almost 8,000 trees that we monitor every month, if they’re fruiting or flowering. One reason why orangutans have big ranges is they need to go to wherever the fruit is.
