There are less than 14,000 Sumatran orangutans left in the wild, with habitat loss threatening their survival.
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00:00 The difference between us and them, just 3% of DNA.
00:06 Sumatran orangutans Hadea and Malou are the only of their kind in the south east of England,
00:11 after being moved from Zurich Zoo in Switzerland.
00:15 These two brothers are actually some of the rarest subspecies of orangutan.
00:19 There's fewer than 14,000 of them left in the world and it's hoped that these two will
00:24 be suitable one day to be returned back to Indonesia.
00:28 But the increasing demand for palm oil could leave them with no home to head to.
00:33 Indonesia and Malaysia now make up more than 85% of the global supply.
00:39 It's in a lot of processed foods, cosmetics and soaps.
00:43 According to the WWF, palm oil is in nearly half of all packaged products we find in supermarkets.
00:51 Timber and logging has a really big impact on them but nothing to the scale of palm oil.
00:56 So unsustainable palm oil plantations are clearing such vast areas of their natural
01:01 habitat at a rate that this species just can't recover from, can't keep up with.
01:06 It's decreasing the amount of food they have, it's decreasing their habitat so it's closing
01:09 them in tighter together.
01:11 And it's also causing a lot of problems for people that are residents of those areas as
01:15 well so you get a lot of human wildlife conflict which means they're moving into farmland,
01:19 destroying farmland for food and it's causing big issues for humans as well as it is for
01:24 orangutans too.
01:26 The pair are part of a project to protect the subspecies and educate the public.
01:32 One day they could even be part of a breeding programme for a generation of orangutans here
01:37 in Hive.
01:38 What's really interesting about them is how different they are to other great apes.
01:42 So yeah they are a solitary animal, they're also arboreal which means they spend 90% of
01:46 their time up in the trees, they rarely come down onto the ground.
01:50 So getting a look at how we look after them and how they interact with each other when
01:54 I compare it to the gorillas which are obviously a social species more like humans and chimpanzees
01:59 and bonobos.
02:00 A solitary species but these brothers have been inseparable since birth.
02:06 So perhaps that's why they've learnt how to share.
02:09 Oh that's really sweet, like a trade.
02:16 Do you think that's like a trade?
02:24 Yeah so he wants to swap what he has for what I've got and isn't really getting that I'm
02:29 letting him pick out of the tree.
02:32 This subspecies is one of the world's most critically endangered primates.
02:38 Portlem's project now is to be part of the solution.
02:42 Abbey Hook for KMTV in Hive.
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