Next time you visit the Toronto Zoo, don't be surprised to see orangutans playing Angry Birds on iPads.
The apes may soon be tapping on the popular Apple tablets as part of a North America-wide project to mentally stimulate orangutans in captivity.
Apps for Apes aims to give the primates a high-tech tool to develop their cognitive skills by watching videos, playing games or creating art and music. Orangutans may even be able to get face-to-face time with their far-flung relatives in other zoos using video chat.
Richard Zimmerman of the conservation group Orangutan Outreach came up with Apps for Apes after the first iPad was unveiled with much fanfare two years ago.
"I thought to myself, wow, this would be a great tool for orangutans' enrichment," he told Â鶹´«Ã½ Channel Thursday.
When the iPads were first shown to orangutans at the Milwaukee Zoo, the apes were "very interested," Zimmerman said. He decided to expand the project to as many zoos in North America as possible.
Zimmerman is especially interested in the Toronto Zoo because one of its orangutans, Jahe, was moved to the Memphis Zoo two years ago so she could become the matriarch of a new family. Zoo keepers would like to use iPads to connect Jahe with her brother and mother in Toronto via Skype or the tablet's video conferencing function.
Previous exercises have shown that orangutans typically recognize one another in pictures, Toronto Zoo orangutan keeper Matthew Berridge told CTV.
"We're hoping that with something like Skype, they'll really enjoy the moving image of (an orangutan) they know," he said.
The six Toronto Zoo orangutans have been playing with touch screens for years. Berridge said they love watching videos on his smartphone, although he admits he's not willing to hand it over to them.
The project not only aims to enrich orangutans' experience in captivity, but also raise awareness of their precarious existence in the wild, Zimmerman said.
Orangutans are endangered animals whose natural habitats in Indonesia and Malaysia are disappearing at an alarming rate due to deforestation.
Orangutan Outreach wants to "let people see that orangutans are super-intelligent, beautiful animals … and they deserve a better deal than they're getting right now in the wild," Zimmerman said.
