To celebrate World Orangutan Day, we’ve pulled together some incredible facts about orangutans to inspire you to help protect the unique rainforests they call home.
1. Orangutans live for a long time.
They can survive up to 35-40 years in the wild. There are orangutans alive today who were alive during the time of the Berlin Wall. That’s a long time!
Over their lifetime, orangutans will witness the forests they live in being chopped down or burnt in order to plant more palm trees – which are used to produce palm oil and palm kernel.
2. Orangutans sleep in nests in the trees, just like birds.
They build their nests from branches and leaves before they go to sleep every night. Usually, they will build a new nest every night, although sometimes they reuse old nests. They have even been known to make roofs for their nests to protect themselves from the weather. It takes an orangutan just 10-15 minutes to build these amazing nests.
3. Orangutans have learned how to use medicine to deal with injuries.
Earlier this year, a wild orangutan in Indonesia was injured. But instead of just leaving the injury to heal on its own, he did something different. The orangutan chewed plant leaves which are known to have pain-relieving and healing properties, and then applied the juice on the open wound. This shocked scientists all around the world – and is an indication of just how clever orangutans really are.
4. The Orangutan can laugh, just like humans!
Orangutans are known to tickle each other, and will often laugh while wrestling or playing with one another.
5. Orangutans can eat with their feet.
Orangutans will use both their hands and their feet to eat food while moving through the trees! Their feet look almost exactly the same as their hands, with opposable big toes for gripping branches and climbing.
Orangutans eat a lot of fruit, including lychees, mangoes, figs, and mangosteens. They’ll also eat leaves and shoots, insects, soil, and tree bark. Sometimes they’ll even eat eggs, or small mammals like the slow loris.
6. The word ‘orangutan’ literally translates to ‘person of the forest’.
In Malay and Indonesian, orang means ‘person’. Utan is derived from the word ‘hutan’ which means ‘forest’. Orangutans are literally ‘people of the forest’ – the forests that they live in define them. Without the rainforests, the orangutans would not exist – and we are seeing that taking place now as their homes are destroyed through deforestation.
7. Fonterra and the New Zealand dairy industry are one of the key reasons why orangutans are going extinct.
Because there are so many cows in New Zealand, there often isn’t enough grass to feed them. That’s why the dairy industry imports millions of tonnes of palm kernel every year. But there’s a dirty secret behind palm kernel – it comes from the rainforest-destroying palm plantations in orangutan habitats, the same place that palm oil comes from. The dairy industry here in New Zealand is driving habitat destruction by providing a massive market for this rainforest-destroying palm kernel.
8. You can take action to protect the orangutans with us!
Join us and call for the phase out of imported feed like palm kernel here in Aotearoa.
Join us to call on the New Zealand Government to phase out imported animal feed like PKE for the good of our climate, wildlife and human health everywhere.
Take Action