Carel van Schaik had a dilemma. In August 1993 he was sitting in a crude shelter in the Suaq Balimbing swamp in Sumatra, deciding whether he should make the place his scientific home. Van Schaik, a primatologist at Duke University, studies orangutans. Suaq had a lot of them--as many as 20 individuals per square mile. But Suaq is a godforsaken place. Never mind the prevalence of malaria, dengue fever, and typhoid--simply following the orangutans as they moved high overhead in the trees required wading through thigh-high muck. Every day was an exercise in exhaustion.
We were sitting there in our little shelter, thinking, ‘Well, the place certainly has a lot of orangutans,’ says van Schaik. But it was such a terribly deep swamp. We were really tearing our hair out, wondering whether we should stay there or not. And then Ibrahim, one of my Indonesian assistants, just dropped in a ...
