53 Fun Facts About Orangutan

In which 1978 film did Clint Eastwood's trucker hero keep a pet orangutan named Clyde?

Every Which Way but Loose was a film Eastwood made against the advice of those around him, yet it became one of his biggest box-office hits.

Most Western sources say the name 'orangutan' comes from Malay words meaning what?

Person of the forest: orang means 'person' and hutan 'forest', and the Malay term may first have meant forest-dwelling people rather than the ape.

What is the orangutan's genus?

Pongo began as the name of a large African ape in an English sailor's tale, and naturalists later transferred it to the orangutans.

The orangutan species named in 2017 lives south of which Sumatran lake?

Toba: south of it, in Batang Toru, a hydroelectric plant was planned in the area where the new species lives most densely.

Which UK supermarket's 2018 Christmas advert, about an orangutan called Rang-tan, was refused clearance for TV?

Iceland's advert was first made by Greenpeace, and Clearcast refused it because Greenpeace could not show it was not a political advertiser.

What did genome studies reveal about the Tapanuli orangutan?

It is closer to Bornean than Sumatran orangutans, despite living on Sumatra: its line split from Sumatran apes about 3.4 million years ago but from Bornean apes only about 674,000 years ago.

Chantek, an orangutan raised on a Tennessee university campus, learned to communicate using what?

American Sign Language: raised in a campus trailer, Chantek also learned to clean his room and memorised the way to a fast-food restaurant.

Which extinct ape in the orangutan's subfamily was first identified from molars sold in Chinese drugstores?

Gigantopithecus is thought to have died out after a more seasonal climate shrank the forests it depended on for food.

Why do humans have fewer chromosomes than orangutans?

Fusion of two ancestral chromosomes formed human chromosome 2, which still carries the remnant of a second centromere.

What distinctive feature do dominant adult male orangutans develop?

Cheek pads or flanges may stay undeveloped for years in a grown male while a dominant male is near, appearing once that dominant male is gone.

What do the male orangutan's throat pouches do?

Act as resonance chambers for long calls: inflating the pouch helps a male's call carry far, drawing in females and warning rival males away.

Among the great apes, orangutans are the most what?

Arboreal and solitary as they are, orangutans still come together when and where fruit is plentiful.

Which part of an orangutan's hand is unusually short, suiting it to hooking onto branches?

The thumb is short and sits out of the way, so the long curved fingers can curl around thin branches as the ape hangs and swings.

Which big cat is a potential predator of orangutans on Sumatra?

The tiger lives on Sumatra but not Borneo, which may be why Sumatran orangutans come down to the ground less than Bornean orangutans.

Besides fruit, leaves and insects, what unusual item do wild orangutans sometimes eat?

Mineral-rich soil may help: primates are thought to eat earth to take in minerals and to neutralise toxins from the leaves they eat.

What earns orangutans the nickname 'gardeners of the forest'?

Spreading seeds in dung matters most for large-seeded plants, whose fruit smaller forest animals pass over, so those plants lean heavily on orangutans to travel.

What noise does an uncomfortable orangutan make?

A kiss squeak is made by sucking air in through pursed lips, and at Tuanan, Borneo, orangutans press leaves to their lips while calling, perhaps to sound bigger.

How does an orangutan mother get her youngster across a wide gap in the trees?

Bridges it with her body: she holds branches on both sides so the youngster can climb across, and she gives less of this help as it grows more capable.

Orangutan mothers hold which parenting record among all mammals?

The longest nursing period can pass eight years, and barium from milk laid down in their teeth hints that youngsters nurse more when fruit runs short.

Carers at Borneo's orangutan 'forest schools' fake terror at a rubber model of which animal?

Snake fear is learned rather than inborn in orangutans, and orphans have no mother to copy, so their carers must act it out for them.

How do Bornean orangutans get through the lean years after a forest-wide fruit glut?

Burning stored fat, put on by gorging while the forest fruits all at once, carries them through; when it runs out, their bodies start breaking down muscle instead.

A 2008 Leipzig Zoo study made orangutans the first non-human species documented doing what?

Calculated reciprocity is helping another while expecting payback, and earlier animal tests had found scarcely any evidence of it.

Bonnie, an orangutan at the US National Zoo, was recorded doing what after hearing a caretaker?

Whistling isn't in the natural orangutan repertoire; Bonnie learned it by copying a caretaker, without ever being trained to do it.

Orangutans have been observed using sticks to poke at which prey to make them leap from the water?

Catfish jabbed with a stick could flop out of ponds into waiting hands, hinting that early human ancestors could also have fished with tools.

In 2022 a Sumatran orangutan named Rakus was seen treating a facial wound with what?

Chewed leaves of a vine that people also use as medicine covered the wound, which closed within five days with no sign of infection.

After a landmark Argentine rights case, Sandra the orangutan left Buenos Aires in 2019 for a sanctuary in which country?

United States: after a 2015 Buenos Aires ruling called Sandra a non-human person owed better conditions, she moved to the Center for Great Apes in 2019.

Ah Meng, an orangutan once named a Special Tourism Ambassador, was the star attraction of which zoo?

Singapore Zoo made her the host of its 'Breakfast with an Orang Utan' programme, and when she died in 2008 about 4,000 people came to pay their respects.

Which primatologist pioneered field study of orangutans from a Borneo site she named Camp Leakey?

Biruté Galdikas also persuaded people keeping orangutans as pets to hand them over, so they could be rehabilitated and released into the forest.

Sir Oran Haut-Ton, an orangutan who stands for Parliament, appears in which 1817 satirical novel?

Melincourt's Sir Oran is built on the theories of Lord Monboddo, who held that the orangutan belonged to the human species and only lacked speech.

An orangutan is the killer in which 1841 Edgar Allan Poe story?

The Murders in the Rue Morgue has witnesses who cannot name the language of a shrill voice, because it belongs to a sailor's orangutan brought from Borneo.

In Planet of the Apes, orangutans are typically portrayed as what?

Bureaucrats like Dr Zaius run ape society; Edward G. Robinson screen-tested as Zaius but dropped out, daunted by the hours in heavy makeup, so Maurice Evans played him.

Which jazzy orangutan did Disney add to its 1967 Jungle Book, wanting Mowgli to teach him about fire?

King Louie rules monkeys who, in Kipling's original book, have no law and no leaders at all, let alone a king.

Which character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels is an orangutan?

The Librarian was turned into an orangutan by a burst of magic and refused to be changed back, since an ape can climb to the high shelves.

Jenny, an orangutan at London Zoo in the 1830s, is remembered for meeting which scientist?

Charles Darwin watched Jenny sulk like a child when a keeper held back an apple, and the visits reinforced his view that humans were created from animals.

Ken Allen, nicknamed 'the hairy Houdini', became famous in the 1980s for escaping from which zoo?

San Diego Zoo was where, witnesses said, he showed another orangutan how to use a branch as a crowbar to break out.

How does the IUCN classify all three orangutan species?

Critically Endangered as they are, orangutans are slow to recover from losses, because a female has a baby only about once every seven to nine years.

Clearing forest for plantations producing which commodity is a major cause of orangutan habitat loss?

Palm oil yields far more oil per hectare than other oil crops, so swapping it for them could mean clearing even more land.

A 2018 study estimated that Borneo lost roughly how many orangutans between 1999 and 2015?

About 150,000 vanished, and most were lost in forest still standing rather than cleared land, which hints that hunting played a big part.

What does a 2026 study say killed dozens of Tapanuli orangutans in late 2025?

Landslides after a cyclone killed an estimated 58, about 7% of the species, when losing more than 1% a year could push it towards extinction.

Which spiky tropical fruit is a favourite food of orangutans?

Durian is famous for a stench likened to sewage, and orangutans have been seen gripping spiky fruit with a pad of leaves, like a glove.

An orangutan rescued from villagers in Central Kalimantan in 2017 drew attention for being what?

An albino orangutan, and the only known one, Alba was freed into a Bornean national park in 2018, despite the eyesight risks albinism brings.

Why did locals quoted by Bontius say the orangutan could talk but chose not to?

So it would not be forced to work, Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius wrote in the 1600s, though some scholars doubt the creature he described was an ape at all.

Which two great-ape genomes were sequenced before the Sumatran orangutan's?

Humans and chimpanzees came first, and the orangutan genome proved to have changed far more slowly over time than theirs.

Nonja the orangutan's photos went straight to which website after Vienna's zoo gave her a camera in 2009?

Facebook got each picture over a Wi-Fi link, and the specially made camera rewarded her with a raisin every time she took one.

Which lowland forest type has the densest orangutan populations?

Swamp forest yields more fruit through the year than drier forest, so orangutans, which move to follow fruit, are densest there.

When did wild orangutan mothers raise the alarm over a researcher disguised as a predator?

Minutes after it left: mothers that called at all waited seven minutes on average, a hint that orangutans can signal about a danger no longer in view.

To study the roots of human laughter in 2009, what did researchers do to young orangutans and other apes?

Tickled them: the recorded laughs fitted the family tree of apes and humans, suggesting laughter began in a shared ancestor.

For their body size, how does orangutans' energy use compare with other mammals'?

Less than nearly any mammal, even inactive humans, a 2010 study found, which may help orangutans survive frequent spells when food is scarce.

An orangutan's jawbone, stained to look ancient, was part of which famous fossil hoax exposed in 1953?

Piltdown Man was 'found' near the Sussex village of Piltdown in 1912; the forger had filed the orangutan's teeth down so the jaw would pass as human.

In the 1996 comedy Dunston Checks In, the orangutan's owner poses as a lord but is really what?

A jewel thief, 'Lord' Rutledge had trained Dunston to steal for him, but the ape escapes and befriends Kyle, the hotel manager's son.

In a 2010 Greenpeace video, an office worker unwraps which chocolate bar and finds an orangutan's finger?

KitKat maker Nestlé, hit by the viral clip, agreed to work with The Forest Trust on removing deforestation from its supply chain.

Which orangutan rehabilitation centre is located in Sabah, Malaysia?

Sepilok takes in orphans from logging sites, plantations and the pet trade and trains them to survive in the wild before releasing them.

At Washington's National Zoo, how can orangutans travel between the Great Ape House and a second building?

Overhead cables on towers form the O-Line, and the orangutans decide for themselves whether to swing across to the Think Tank building or stay put.