'Online Dating' For Orangutans Will Be Used To Find Mating Partners

Matchmaking or looking for a suitable partner has changed its way in the last few decades. Online dating is the most popular and most used service all over the world. It looks like these online services may not be limited to humans. The zookeepers at Apenheul Primate Park in Netherlands are planning to search for a male partner for their female orangutan Samboja who has come of age.

Earlier, the zoo officials made a Facebook post that announced that Samboja is in search of a mating partner. Now, they have decided that they will be showing a few pictures of eligible and available male orangutans to Samboja and will try to study her response to them.

They will look for indications, which may depict Samboja's preference for some pictures over others. This could significantly help in narrowing down the number of potential candidates in the upcoming breeding program, Yahoo reported.

This groundbreaking initiative is a part of a four-year research project on breeding of apes, which will most likely lead to the development of "Tinder dating app for apes."

Thomas Bionda, expert Zoologist, said, "Often, animals have to be taken back to the zoo they came from without mating. Things don't always go well when a male and a female first meet."

This leads to the wastage of a lot of money and time. "We want to help our animals and maybe other zoos' animals to make a choice," Bionda added.

The said experiment was preceded by a similar experiment, which involved the application of online video chatting for finding mating partners for orangutans in Wilhelma Zoo, Germany. Sinta, one of the two orangutans that participated in the study, developed a likelihood for a male orangutan named Gempa from a Belgian Zoo. A date was arranged for them, but they failed to produce any offspring, Newsday reported.

Zookeepers say that one of the main hurdles of using tablet and MacBook for orangutans is that they are too fragile and the orangutans destroy the screen of the device within minutes. Researchers are looking for strong orangutan-friendly screens, and people may never know, apes and monkeys may be chatting online with their partners and scheduling dates through online dating sites just as humans do.