Lar Gibbon
Hylobates lar
IUCN red list status:
Endangered
For more information, please visit iucnredlist.org
Lar Gibbons live in Southern Asia, from Thailand to Malaysia.
Their diet consists of fruits, particularly favouring figs, young shoots, leaves, flowers and insects.
They can live 30 years in the wild and over 40 years in captivity.
A single youngster is born after a gestation period of 210-240 days.
Lar Gibbon
About the Lar Gibbon
Lar gibbons are apes so, unlike monkeys, they don't have a tail. A gibbon’s coat can be almost any colour from black and dark brown to light sandy colours. The face is surrounded by a ring of white fur, and the hands and feet are white. Their long arms and long hooked fingers are used for movement through the tree tops by a hand-over-hand pattern known as brachiation.
Fruit makes up 50% of their diet, but they also feed on leaves, insects, flowers, stems and buds. In the wild gibbons supplement their diet with meat by catching birds out of the air as they swing through branches. Each group of gibbons lives in a territory, which they defend from neighbours by loud calling or hooting displays, that are normally performed most mornings.
Did you know?
Gibbons can move through the forest at speeds of up to 35mph, swinging through the trees with gaps as wide as 50ft in one single leap.
