Females are smaller, 90 centimeters on average and they weigh up to 40 kilograms. The Sumatran orangutans grow to about 1.4 meters tall and males weigh up to 80 kilograms. This great apes prefer leaves and fruits including figs and jack fruits, but they also often eat bird eggs, small vertebrates, termites or ants. Their diet generally consists of vegetarian items and insects. They can make several kilometers per day, looking for food and making a new nest each night in a tree for sleeping, only coming together for minimal social interaction. Orangutans spend most of their lives in the tops of the trees and climb from branch to branch. The official feeding through national park rangers has recently been stopped but this area is still highly popular with a lot of orangutans. The continuous feeding helped the rangers to observe the great apes in order to make sure that they are managing their live well in the wild. Until December 2015 the orangutans normally got fed twice a day with bananas and milk to adapt them to fodder in the wild. Even though it doesn’t operate as a rehabilitation center any longer, the area is open for tourists to take memorable impressions home. Since the Bohorok Centre for ex-captive Sumatran orangutans was established in 1973, more than 200 orangutans have been released into the Gunung Leuser National Park. However, an excursion to the old feeding area near Bukit Lawang is still an unforgettable experience for everybody! Visitors are able to see semi-wild orangutans there in a quite close distance. But just an influenza – caused by a human visitor in the rainforest – can potentially kill an orangutan! It is a necessity that no direct contact takes place there! For their protection it is forbidden to enter the rainforest without a registered and experienced guide. The great apes share over 96.5% of its genetic DNA with us, they are highly intelligent, thinking and feeling like human beings and they are like us in many other ways. It’s really a memorable experience to watch the orangutans in the tropical rainforest of Gunung Leuser National Park, but this animals should be really protected with care.
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