AN UNEXPECTED, WILD FRIENDSHIP
Recently, the weather in Central Kalimantan, especially around Nyaru Menteng, has been unpredictable: Sometimes it is very hot and dry, while other times there is heavy rainfall and cool temperatures. As a result, several of Nyaru Menteng’s Forest School students fell...
ORANGUTANS AND NATURE’S REMEDIES
Rakus, a Sumatran orangutan, has been in the news using Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria) to treat an injury by chewing up the leaves of the plant and putting them directly on his wound. F. tinctoria has long been used in traditional medicine to treat wounds and other...
A WEED, A SNACK, A WILDFLOWER, OR A REMEDY?
Wild plants are considered weeds if they can often outcompete other plants by dominating the absorption of nutrients, water, and sunlight. Melastoma malabathricum, a tiny shrub from the Melastomataceae family, is one of the weeds that grows abundantly in Bornean...
ARE ORANGUTANS EMPATHETIC?
It was a usual day at the Nyaru Menteng forest school, where young orangutans were learning from one another while their human surrogate mothers looked on from below. The treetop lessons are only interrupted momentarily for supplementary food breaks, but on this day,...