Impress your friends, co-workers, and loved ones with orangutan facts:
There are three orangutan species: Pongo pygmaeus (the Bornean orangutan), Pongo abelii (the Sumatran orangutan), and Pongo tapanuliensis (the Tapanuli orangutan).
They spend most of their lives swinging through the canopies and need vast stretches of forest to find enough food and mates.
Orangutans use both hands and feet while gathering food and travelling through the trees. Like us, orangutans have ten fingers, including two thumbs! Their feet look almost exactly the same as their hands – designed for agile climbing and gripping.
We normally think of nests as the creations of birds, but our ape cousins build nests too. Orangutans build tree beds by weaving branches, twigs and leaves together into a bowl-shaped cradle.
Some orangutans use tools such as sticks to get termites, ants, or bee larvae out of tree holes. These smart creatures have also been observed making a glove out of leaves when handling prickly fruits or thorny branches.
All three orangutan species are currently classified as ‘Critically Endangered’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN Red Data List 2016). Threats to their survival began with hunting centuries ago but are now mainly attributed to mass deforestation and climate change.