There's two types of orangutan, two different species. There's Bornean orangutans and then
there's Sumatran orangutans.
Tsunami is a Sumatran orangutan. She is seven years old and she's called Tsunami because
she was born just after the tsunami of 2004. These are critically endangered species.
The Zoo were very keen to be involved in this project because it assists them greatly in
their Enrichment Programme, which is a programme designed to try and get animals back into
doing the kind of natural behaviours that they would ordinarily miss out in a sort of
a captive situation. In the wild she would use her vision and her hands in conjunction
together. So vision and hands work together to guide the animal through the environment.
They use vision to find food, to use tools, to basically... to locomote, and climb and so on.
Enrichment is very important for animals in captivity because we don't want them to show
stereotypical behaviours such as pacing in tigers and bears. So we keep them occupied
and we also want them to be able to exhibit any natural behaviour. We also focus a lot
on the apes. We make sure the apes get enrichment every day, or if not it's every other day,
because apes are highly intelligent animals and we don't want them to get bored. And you
know they can display very serious stereotypical behaviours. The results of Neil's research
will be very beneficial to us if we actually know, like, how wide their view is, their
eyesight how, how far they can see or if we can actually predict what they want to do.
So maybe we can think of an enrichment that suits their intelligence.
She very quickly learnt to use the baseball cap within a few days. We then moved on to
other head-like, hat-like objects such as a child's bicycle helmet, a head-band - one
of those elastic head-bands that holds a torch - and then we then moved onto a... basically
a practice eye-tracker. The eye-tracker consists of a back-pack, which is basically a wireless
transmitter, and what that transmits is the data from two video cameras which are mounted
on a head-band that she's wearing. What we intend to do is use one camera to film the
scene ahead, so we're filming what she's looking at. And in the second camera, that's filming
her right eye. And we then use a system developed by the company who made this Positive Science
software to then work out where she's looking in the first video camera.
You will have seen in the past, you know, orangutans involved in advertising and used in the movies and
so on, where they've learned various tricks.
What we're doing here is different in that I'm trying to record her behaviour in as natural
as possible environment. As part of her enrichment programme which the Zoo is running, what we're
doing is we're trying to get her to do various natural tasks such as locomotion in a 3D environment,
or tool use, or general strategies for searching for food rewards.
Fundamentally, the aim of my research, probably a long time in the future, is to be recording
animals out in the wild as they navigate. But we have to start somewhere. As Tsunami
gains in confidence, and to be honest she's still quite a young animal, she's only seven,
I'd like her to eventually go out into the bigger enclosure that they have here at the
Zoo. And I would like to, you know, record, you know, those moments when she does that,
and how she learns those environments. I could have done this, this research at any zoo that
has great apes. The reason I want to do it here in Malaysia is because the orangutan
is, if you like, a flagship symbol of Malaysia. The orangutan is endangered. I think it's
only fitting that we do that research here and that's one of the reasons why I'm working,
you know, at the Malaysian Campus of the University of Nottingham.