Critically endangered orangutan brothers arrive at Port Lympne

There are less than 14,000 Sumatran orangutans left in the wild, with habitat loss threatening their survival.

Transcript

00:00 The difference between us and them, just 3% of DNA.

00:06 Sumatran orangutans Hadea and Malou are the only of their kind in the south east of England,

00:11 after being moved from Zurich Zoo in Switzerland.

00:15 These two brothers are actually some of the rarest subspecies of orangutan.

00:19 There's fewer than 14,000 of them left in the world and it's hoped that these two will

00:24 be suitable one day to be returned back to Indonesia.

00:28 But the increasing demand for palm oil could leave them with no home to head to.

00:33 Indonesia and Malaysia now make up more than 85% of the global supply.

00:39 It's in a lot of processed foods, cosmetics and soaps.

00:43 According to the WWF, palm oil is in nearly half of all packaged products we find in supermarkets.

00:51 Timber and logging has a really big impact on them but nothing to the scale of palm oil.

00:56 So unsustainable palm oil plantations are clearing such vast areas of their natural

01:01 habitat at a rate that this species just can't recover from, can't keep up with.

01:06 It's decreasing the amount of food they have, it's decreasing their habitat so it's closing

01:09 them in tighter together.

01:11 And it's also causing a lot of problems for people that are residents of those areas as

01:15 well so you get a lot of human wildlife conflict which means they're moving into farmland,

01:19 destroying farmland for food and it's causing big issues for humans as well as it is for

01:24 orangutans too.

01:26 The pair are part of a project to protect the subspecies and educate the public.

01:32 One day they could even be part of a breeding programme for a generation of orangutans here

01:37 in Hive.

01:38 What's really interesting about them is how different they are to other great apes.

01:42 So yeah they are a solitary animal, they're also arboreal which means they spend 90% of

01:46 their time up in the trees, they rarely come down onto the ground.

01:50 So getting a look at how we look after them and how they interact with each other when

01:54 I compare it to the gorillas which are obviously a social species more like humans and chimpanzees

01:59 and bonobos.

02:00 A solitary species but these brothers have been inseparable since birth.

02:06 So perhaps that's why they've learnt how to share.

02:09 Oh that's really sweet, like a trade.

02:16 Do you think that's like a trade?

02:24 Yeah so he wants to swap what he has for what I've got and isn't really getting that I'm

02:29 letting him pick out of the tree.

02:32 This subspecies is one of the world's most critically endangered primates.

02:38 Portlem's project now is to be part of the solution.

02:42 Abbey Hook for KMTV in Hive.

02:45 [BLANK_AUDIO]