14-year-old endangered creature finds new home at California zoo. Meet Labu
A 14-year-old endangered creature has been welcomed by a zoo in California, officials said.
On March 10, Labu, a Sumatran orangutan, arrived at the San Diego Zoo from the Fresno Chaffee Zoo as part of the Species Survival Plan Program, according to an April 22 news release.
He can be seen hanging in the zoo's orangutan habitat after being introduced to the other members of the group, officials said.
He's adjusting well, swinging on his hammock and investigating his new environment, zoo keepers said.
Orangutans, which usually have reddish fur and long facial hair, feed on fruits and 'slurp water from holes in trees,' according to the World Wildlife Fund.
They are classified as critically endangered and can reach up to 200 pounds in weight, the WWF said.
He's the first adult male to be welcomed to the troop since the 2021 death of a orangutan named Satu, officials said.
Visitors are welcome to take a peek at Labu while he continues to grow more comfortable in his new space, officials said.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Yahoo
Missing merluza: Chile's battle to save its favorite catch
Before setting sail for the South Pacific, Chilean fisherman Rodrigo Gallardo blesses himself to invoke heavenly protection and luck in his pursuit of an increasingly elusive catch: hake. Strong winds make for a choppy seven-nautical-mile (13 kilometer) voyage from the port of Valparaiso to deep waters that decades ago were teeming with Chile's favorite fish. But several hours later, when Gallardo reels in a longline studded with sardines (these small fry are used as bait) just a single hake has bitten. "In the past, the hold was completely full," the 46-year-old lamented. The South Pacific hake, or merluccius gayi, provides a living for some 4,000 small-scale fishermen in Chile, a country with over 6,000 kilometers of coastline, which has a voracious appetite for "merluza." But the attraction for cod's more affordable cousin is proving fatal. Along central Chile's traditional fishing heartland, more and more boats are returning to port with empty holds as overfishing and climate change decimate hake stocks. In the past two decades, Chile's hake population has declined by 70 percent according to the Fisheries Development Institute (IFOP). Gallardo, 46, blames years of regulations that benefitted commercial "bottom" trawlers, which use drag nets to scoop up huge amounts of deep-water fish, like hake, depleting ocean stocks. Commercial fisheries, for their part, blame illegal fishing by small-scale fishermen like Gallardo. - Regulations fall short - Chile has been fighting a high stakes battle against overfishing for years. With several species in severe decline by the early 2010s, from hake to jack mackerel and jumbo squid, the government introduced annual biomass (weight) quotas designed to determine sustainable fishing levels. Chile also designated over 40 percent of its waters as Marine Protected Areas, where fishing is restricted, and signed up to the United Nations High Seas Treaty on protecting marine biodiversity. A decade on, the populations of some species, such as sardines, cuttlefish and horse mackerel -- Chile's biggest fish export -- have begun to recover. The hake numbers, however, continue to make for grim reading. An IFOP study from 2024 showed a 17 percent drop in the biomass of hake stocks compared to the previous year. - Drop in the ocean - Rodrigo Catalan, conservation director of the Chilean chapter of the World Wildlife Fund, blames a mix of "illegal fishing, over-exploitation and climate change" for making hake increasingly scarce. In 2023, authorities seized 58 tons of illegal hake, the second-largest seizure by species after anchovies. The authorities suspect it's just a drop in the ocean. Because hake is usually caught close to shore, it's easy to quickly reel it in without being noticed. Much of the illegal catch winds up for sale in small quantities on markets, which also makes it difficult to detect, according to the National Fisheries Service. Experts say climate change is also wreaking havoc with fish stocks. Alicia Gallardo, a researcher at the University of Chile, said that rising sea temperatures was causing hake to migrate further south in search of colder currents, and was also affecting reproduction rates. - Too many nets, too few fish - Having to share an ever-shrinking catch -- the annual quota for hake now stands at 35,000 tons, down from 118,000 in 2001 -- has caused tempers in Chile to flare. "There aren't enough fish for so many fishermen," Liesbeth van der Meer, director of the ocean conservation NGO Oceana remarked. Small-scale fishermen in Valparaiso clashed with police during three days of protests in March over delays in adopting a bill that boosted their share of the catch quota for hake, among other species. Chile's biggest commercial fishery PacificBlu threatened to close shop, with the loss of 3,200 jobs, if its share was cut but later revoked the threat. The bill, which increases the quota for artisanal fishing from 40 percent to 45 percent, was finally adopted by the Senate this week. pa/cb/bgs
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Yahoo
Orangutan escapes exhibit after a ‘malfunction' at Denver Zoo
DENVER (KDVR) — An orangutan was able to escape from its exhibit after a 'malfunction' at the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance on Wednesday. The Denver Zoo confirmed with FOX31 that on Wednesday, around 3:45 p.m., employees were doing a check when they discovered that an orangutan wasn't in its exhibit. Jake Kubié with the Denver Zoo said there was a 'malfunction in the primary enclosure area,' and an orangutan left the enclosure. Toucan relocated from SeaQuest to Denver Zoo euthanized after medical battles However, the great ape wasn't completely on the loose. Kubié said the orangutan went into another area for specialists and didn't come in contact with any employees or visitors. The zoo has Sumatran orangutans, a species that is usually between three and six feet tall and weighs between 66 and 250 pounds, depending on their gender. Here's what they look like: The Denver Zoo is an 80-acre campus in the City Park neighborhood. The zoo said there are over 2,500 animals at the zoo, including penguins, camels, hippopotamus and lions. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Yahoo
What the hidden rhythms of orangutan calls can tell us about language
In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting sounds. At first, these calls may seem like a random collection of noises – but my rhythmic analyses reveal a different story. Those noises are the calls of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), used to warn others about the presence of predators. Orangutans belong to our animal family – we're both great apes. That means we share a common ancestor – a species that lived millions of years ago, from which we both evolved. Like us, orangutans have hands that can grasp, they use tools and can learn new things. We share about 97% of our DNA with orangutans, which means many parts of our bodies and brains work in similar ways. That's why studying orangutans can also help us understand more about how humans evolved, especially when it comes to things like communication, intelligence and the roots of language and rhythm. Research on orangutan communication conducted by evolutionary psychologist Adriano Lameira and colleagues in 2024 focused on a different species of orangutan, the wild Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii). They looked at a type of vocalisation made only by males, known as the long call, and found that long calls are organised into two levels of rhythmic hierarchy. This was a groundbreaking discovery, showing that orangutan rhythms are structured in a recursive way. Human language is deeply recursive. Recursion is when something is built from smaller parts that follow the same pattern. For example, in language, a sentence can contain another sentence inside it. In music, a rhythm can be made of smaller rhythms nested within each other. It's a way of organising information in layers, where the same structure repeats at different levels. So, when the two-level rhythmic pattern was discovered in the long calls of male Bornean orangutans, my team wanted to know whether this kind of rhythm was unique to those particular calls, or revealed a deeper part of how orangutans communicate. To find out, we studied the alarm calls of wild female Sumatran orangutans and found something surprising. Instead of two levels, as had been seen in the Bornean males, this time we found three. This is an even more sophisticated pattern than we expected. Returning to those alarm calls echoing through the Indonesian forest, we can now hear them with new ears. With the help of statistical tools, what sounded like random noise now takes on a clear structure – a rhythmic pattern of calls grouped into regular bouts and repeated in sequences. Each layer follows a steady rhythm, like the ticking of a metronome. Until recently, many scientists believed only humans could build layered vocal structures. This belief helped reinforce the idea of a divide between us and other animals. But our discovery adds to a growing body of research showing this divide may not be so clear-cut. Studies on great apes and other animals such as lemurs, whales and dolphins have revealed they are capable of rhythmic structuring, vocal learning, combining signals and sounds to make new ones, and even using vowels and consonants. These findings suggest the roots of language may lie in shared evolutionary mechanisms. Human language is unique in many ways. But it probably did not appear suddenly. Even the most striking traits in life evolve by reshaping what already exists, through the slow work of variation and natural selection. Our work suggests the brain systems needed to build recursive patterns were present in our ancestors millions of years ago. We wanted to take our investigation a step further and ask why recursive patterns evolved. So, we designed an experiment in which wild orangutans were exposed to different predator models, some posing a more realistic threat than others. This involved a person walking on all fours under different-coloured blankets. One had tiger stripes (tigers are orangutan predators). The other blankets were blue, white or multi-coloured. We found that more structured, regular and faster orangutan alarm sequences were made in response to tiger stripes. When the predator seemed less convincing, the vocalisations lost that regularity and slowed down. So, rhythm may help listeners gauge the seriousness of a situation. These patterns in orangutan calls give us some important hints about how language might have started. But it's possible that other animals have similar ways of communicating that we haven't discovered yet. To really understand how things like evolution, social life and the environment shape these interesting communication skills, we need to keep studying many different animals. Perhaps the most surprising lesson is this: complexity doesn't always need words. The rhythms, patterns and structures we have uncovered in orangutan alarms remind us that meaningful communication can emerge in many forms – and that the roots of our language may lie not just in what is said, but how it is expressed. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Chiara De Gregorio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.