Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Zoo enlists breastfeeding mothers to help orangutan
Orangutans are great apes that live in the rainforests of Borneo and
Suatro. They eat fruits mainly but also eat vegetation, bark, honey, insects,
and bird eggs and live for over 30 years.
Orangutan mothers primarily feed their babies through breastfeeding.
Newborn orangutans rely entirely on their mother's milk for the first six to eight
months of life before being introduced to solid food. In a zoo in Dublin,
Ireland, a 19-year-old orangutan gave birth to a male baby at the end of July. She
previously had two babies in 2019 and 2022 but didn’t provide any care to them
at all, so they died. In order to encourage the mother orangutan to feed her
new baby, the zoo carers asked volunteer mothers to show the orangutan mother
how to breastfeed babies in the hope of teaching her how to feed her new baby
when it arrives. They also showed her videos of other mother orangutans feeding
their babies. As a result, the orangutan exhibited better maternal care towards
her new baby than before.
Read the article and learn about the efforts that zoo carers and
volunteer mothers made to encourage an orangutan mother to breastfeed her new
baby.
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