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Orang‐utans “require less food than humans, pound‐for‐pound,” lead author Herman Pontzer said. When they do eat orang‐utans nibble mostly on ripe fruit, along with smaller portions of leaves and seed. Even in captivity, this diet doesn’t diminish an orang‐utan’s get‐up‐and‐go. “They wake up early, after a long night’s sleep,” explained Pontzer, an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington
University in St. Louis. “Then they spend the day socializing, exploring their indoor or outdoor enclosures. They also regularly engage in games with researchers”.
According to a study, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these activities of the orangutan’s, taken together add up to the same level of exercise performed by humans in physically demanding agricultural lifestyles.
In the wild, orang‐utans live in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra where food availability is highly variable and unpredictable, Pontzer added. Like fresh fruit from the garden, the pickings are often feast or famine. “But the trade‐off,” he added, “is that low‐energy throughout means less energy is available to do things like grow and reproduce. So orang‐utans grow slowly and reproduce slowly,
which is evolutionarily risky because an orang‐utan might die before it passes on its genes.” Human mothers can have a child every two to four years, but orang‐utans in the wild only reproduce every seven to eight years.
Orang‐utans are highly endangered, with many lost due to human activities such as logging, mining and the illegal pet trade. Pontzer hopes the study will highlight “how much information we lose about our closest relatives and our own evolutionary history if we let them go extinct.”
Q1. Orang‐utans eat _____ humans do.
