The word orangutan means “person of the forest” – a good name for a group of primates that spend most of their time in trees. These great apes have long arms and long, curved fingers and toes for gripping branches.
This helps them move easily around the tops of jungle trees on the Southeast Asian islands of Sumatra and Borneo.
Orangutans are more solitary than other great apes, such as chimpanzees and bonobos (and humans!). Adult male orangutans live mostly alone. But mother orangutans and their babies have a strong bond.
Young orangutans stay with their mothers for about seven years. And they drink milk for that long, too. Growing up in their mother’s care, young orangutans learn to build nests, sometimes starting as early as a few months old.
Nest building isn’t the only example of orangutan intelligence. These primates are known to use tools to crush nuts or insects for food. And an orangutan was the first wild animal to use a plant with healing properties to treat a wound.
There are three known species of orangutan: Sumatran, Bornean and Tapanuli. All three are critically endangered. The Tapanuli orangutan, which was only discovered in 2017, is the most endangered of all great apes.
There are no more than 800 of them alive today. The biggest threats to orangutans are forest clearing and hunting – which means it’s largely up to people to make sure these clever primates don’t go extinct.