This is the second post of a 2-part series. Read the first part here.

The swamp here could be the stuff of nightmares. Because this happens to be the rainy season, which lasts from October to March, the trails are meant to be waded, not walked. Yet I am utterly stuck, knee-deep in pungent red mud with stagnant water up to my waist. Ellen Meulman, a PhD student from the University of Zurich, doubles back to pull me out of the quagmire. It takes a few hard yanks. "Be careful," she says. "You can disappear in these waters." Thoughts of leeches and king cobras vanish, replaced by a more immediate fear.

We've been slogging and hacking through the jungle for nearly three hours, on our way to rendezvous with today's observation team. The field staff hustles day in and out to arrive at the nest-site before dawn and do not return until after dark. In between, they track the individual behaviors of the orangutan in excruciating detail: Is the subject playing with a neighbor? Eating, and if so, what? Vocalizing? Using a tool?

The orangutans here already know some remarkable tricks. They've learned how to fashion a seed-extraction stick to crack open the prickly shell of the Neesia fruit. The theory goes that this rather complicated skill developed from simpler abilities to use tools to dig for honey, fish for termites, and scoop for water. Yet primatologists know little more than that these smarter-than-we-thought apes possess culture; the pressing question now is to figure out how it's acquired and transferred.

One prominent clue lies in the sheer friendliness of these lowland orangutans, with frequent "parties" attended by the area residents. Curious adults, for instance, will observe their neighbors making umbrellas or gloves out of leaves, and then imitate those behaviors. Juveniles also learn to build mosquito-repellant nests out of terentang leaves by watching their mothers.


Even the simplest nests, perhaps used for an afternoon nap, suggest the presence of culture. "It was always assumed they randomly break sticks together and build nests the same way," Gibson said to me. "But there are definite differences in the arrangement of branches [among groups]." As part of this project, she plans to sleep in one of the 100-foot high nests for a night, which has never been attempted (apparently due to the risk of being attacked by a reticulated python).

Though outsiders often refer to this swamp as "orangutan heaven but human hell," the staff does not plan to jump ship anytime soon. They want to bring the station back to its old glory by this fall, with an new 6-room dormitory, solar panels for constant electricity, and three boardwalks (getting to the orangutans without them can take several hours). They're even hiring-the graduate students need at least five more assistants to juggle the array of projects.

Since fieldwork stopped across Aceh, it's difficult to precisely quantify the impact of the civil war on this biodiversity hotspot, home to elephants, rhinoceroses, leopards, sun bears, tigers, and some 6,500 orangutans. While the primatologists at Suaq lost much more time than their neighbors-eight years of data-the 70 or so test subjects haven't missed a beat. In fact, the concentration of orangutans here, where fruits rain from the trees year-round, is greater than anywhere else in the world (twice the density of other sites on Sumatra and five times the density on Borneo, the only other island where these apes can be found). The unusually high density has enabled these solitary creatures to "teach" each other skills like tool-use, making Suaq the ideal laboratory for studying the origins of human culture.

Yet while work on orangutans has extended the origins of hominid culture to 14 million years ago, the future for these iconic beasts may be nasty, brutish, and short. With mounting threats like palm oil plantations, highway construction, and a booming pet trade, many conservationists have predicted that they will become extinct within a decade or two. A UN report last February warned that 98% of the orangutan's habitat-tropical rainforests-would be gone by 2022.

But for now, Suaq is still a friendly neighborhood. After an afternoon of getting stuck in the mud, I've finally spotted two of the residents: the mellow Lisa and her 6-year-old daughter, Lilly. Lisa, ambling in the treetops, much prefers her sour melaka fruits to our company. But for a brief moment, Lilly swings down to investigate these strange-looking two-legged apes, and realizing we would not make suitable playmates, disappears in a blur of orange.

Filed under: Stories, Indonesia, Camping, Ecotourism