After nearly a year with OuTrop, it is time for us to wave goodbye to our Orangutan Research Assistant, Joey Markx. In our latest blog Joey, who specialises in gestural communication, shares his research findings and his experiences in the forests of Borneo.
It’s here, the sad time to leave the project has come again. In 2014 I finished my undergraduate student research project with OuTrop after four months in the field, but this time it’s different. Being abroad, working in the field of conservation research is something I have always wanted, but who would have thought that at the age of 21, I would have spent another eleven months in Indonesian Borneo!
As written in my previous blog, I returned to the Sabangau Forest to study wild orangutan communication in 2015. Over the past year I have followed six mother-infant orangutan pairs for hundreds of hours, and I think I now have a good understanding of wild mother-infant orangutan communication. Although analyses are still in progress, I can say that wild orangutan communication is different when compared with orangutans in captivity or other ape species. Their semi-solitary lifestyle in the wild, especially in Borneo, provides them with fewer opportunities to communicate, and even within mother-infant pairs who are in close proximity for many years, communication is exhibited at a low rate.
Grooming and play, two behavioural context in which gestures are used more frequently in captive orangutans and other wild and captive ape species, are rarely expressed by wild (mother-infant) orangutans. Newborn infants are extremely dependent on their mothers, they still do not travel on their own and do not feed on any food items (they just drink milk). With time, the infant starts to leave the mother and starts feeding on fruits, leaves, bark and insects. This is when gestural communicative interactions increase, for example when the mother wants to travel and retrieves the infant or when the infant begs for food, untill the frequency reaches a peak. The infant then becomes independent enough to travel completely on it’s own and access all food items, and the frequency decreases. This also applied to vocalisations such as the ‘Soft Hoot & Whimper’, the ‘Cry & Scream’, or the ‘Frustration scream’.
My time working with OuTrop gave me extremely valuable field research experience, but I also experienced the devastating forest fires of 2015. Assisting with forest fire campaigns, raising funds and education initiatives, inspired me to keep working within the field of conservation. Besides following orangutans, I greatly enjoyed being in the forest searching for other wildlife and running into the occasional pit viper, learning about all the other projects from local and international scientists, and of course sharing knowledge, stories and having fun with the local field assistants.
My expectations of my 11 months with OuTrop have been exceeded on many levels and I hope that with the skills I have gained here, I will be able to continue to contribute to wildlife conservation in my future career.
