Why you should care about gibbon conservation
And the broader implications of scientific research

I’m not sure why, exactly, I fell in love with gibbons. At first, my brother harbored a soft spot for them because of their goofy personalities, species-wide proclivity for trolling other animals, from dogs to tigers to humans, and comical limb proportion. Then, while taking a biology of mammals class last year at Harvard, I cradled an absurdly long, skinny gibbon humerus in my lab section. For whatever reason, my heart softened and curled up in warmth, and despite the massive load of readings glaring at me from my desk, I spent the next several hours Youtubing hilarious gibbon videos and reading encyclopedia articles about them.
Unfortunately, as is always the case for any nature lover or wildlife enthusiast, reading about the state of our living world is depressing. But gibbons, in particular, it turns out, are severely endangered by poaching, illegal trafficking, and habitat loss — I read in horror as I found that the Hainan gibbon, with just 25 individuals left, is the most endangered mammal species in the world, and that certainly out of all the ape family members, to which it belongs vis-a-vis its famous cousins—chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans — gibbons are undoubtedly far more endangered. Yet, in their diversity, gibbons account for 70% of all apes. So didn’t I have a clue, then, what gibbons even were, let alone how threatened they were, when great ape conservation deservedly occupies such a large space within wildlife conservation and public awareness?
Further googling that night revealed a fantastic Slate article that illuminated many of the broader issues with wildlife conservation — namely, that gibbons are completely overlooked in realms from wildlife conservation to academic research funding to legal protection to media portrayals (think Planet of the Apes) despite their phylogenetic classification within the ape family, for reasons I’ll elaborate on. That night, I discovered in utter elation, also just happened to be October 24th — International Gibbon Day. And with that unlikely coincidence, what started out as comic relief and a tickling curiosity in the back of my mind transformed instantly into an obsession and justice issue with much broader and provocative implications.
The mammals class gifted me a wonderful justification to delve into this random, obscure, seemingly irrelevant issue in the form of a 15-page research paper. And so I began perusing journal articles in an attempt to understand both the scientific basis for classifying gibbons as lesser apes, as well as the legal, conservation-based, and societal ramifications of such a decision. Here are the main takeaways:
The classification between great and lesser apes is a neutral, purely scientific decision based on size differences, lifestyle differences (gibbons are tree-dwelling or arboreal, whereas gorillas and chimps are terrestrial), and differing performances on intelligence tests.
However, this classification faces serious challenges as recent research has revealed that gibbons’ systematic underperformance has been due to intelligence experiments standardized and given to all apes, but that fails to account for the gibbon’s arboreal lifestyles. Examples include experiments involving plexiglass that confused gibbons due to altered depth perception for treetop swinging, tool use experiments involving sticks that gibbons simply could not grasp with their thumbs shortened for brachiation (swinging locomotion), and observational studies that excluded gibbons as tool users because their behavior didn’t resemble the tool use of chimps.
Yet, more recently, when experiments were customized and adjusted for gibbon lifestyle or morphology, gibbons were proven to perform equally as well as their famous great ape counterparts, such as chimps, and even to outperform them on certain experiments. And upon closer inspection, preliminary evidence for uniquely arboreal tool use has been demonstrated by certain gibbon species. Although this provides hope within the scientific community of reevaluating such classifications, these experiments lack the funding and means to be replicated on a large enough sample size to demonstrate conclusive evidence.
Therefore, a self-perpetuating cycle exists in which the initial damning classification as lesser apes, both lesser in size and in intelligence, has drained interest or research funding to further studying them. Even when promising new studies threaten to overturn conventional knowledge, there is simply not enough existing momentum, knowledge, or interest to justify greater research. And the less knowledge of gibbons, the less awareness, concern, and motivation to research and gain more knowledge. To this day, gibbons remain one of the most ignored, understudied primates.
This fundamentally scientific, academic problem has huge real-world implications for the species:
- Conservation: with so little known about gibbons, especially their intelligence, conservation societies devote much fewer resources to gibbon conservation, despite their more dire circumstances. Gibbons are excluded from great ape conservation, which receives funding as diverse as US Fish and Wildlife to World Wildlife Fund to almost all zoos and conservations. When a Princeton bioethicist and the cofounder of Great Ape Project, an animal rights non-profit, was questioned on why gibbons were excluded, he responded that “we just didn’t know enough about them.” Yet, the requisite research necessary to overturn and draw new conclusions on the gibbons’ “lesser ape” status cannot be attained without the funding and awareness that gibbons lack. And as species like the Hainan gibbon — the species exhibiting the rare preliminary tool use in brachiation — approach the brink of extinction, the race against time intensifies in producing the conclusive research that would champion the gibbon’s case for inclusion in ape conservation. Given that gibbons’ entire survival is contingent on rapidly implemented, comprehensive conservation measures, time is certainly not on their side.
- Legal: While many countries and states have begun passing laws to extend legal rights protecting great apes from abuse, torture, and unnatural death by granting them the rights to life and freedom, gibbons are systematically excluded exclusively due to their categorization as lesser apes — both a damning byproduct of a simply scientific classification and the vicious cycle that perpetuates a lack of interest in and funding for further research to overturn the misconception of gibbon intelligence. While evidence for the self-awareness and emotional depth of great apes have won them this incredible landmark victory, less corroborated but still compelling evidence for the same capacities in gibbons is insufficient to grant them comparable legal protection.
- Public Awareness: With such a dearth of scientific knowledge, how do we even get people to care? What if Louis Leakey had dispatched a Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey for gibbons? What if Disney released a movie on gibbons as well as on chimpanzees? Based on misconceptions of primate locomotion, what if we called monkey bars “gibbon bars” for the true brachiating behavior gibbons exhibit? The founder of the Gibbon Conservation Center in California suggested that if a compelling public awareness campaign could coin gibbons as “small apes” while highlighting their intelligence and cognitive capacities, as was so successful in humpback whale conversation following the release of their first song recordings, perhaps public interest could rescue gibbons from the self-reinforcing cycle in which they are trapped.
And lastly, I believe I owe at least a cursory glance at another can of worms: who are we, ethically, to determine which organisms “deserve” survival? We certainly have played a god-figure-role in genetic manipulation and artificial selection to counter natural selection. Here, too, in conservation, we base our resource allocation on at times arbitrary criteria, such as charisma and even plain old cuteness — think the Giant Panda — and often on the degree of kinship we feel to their emotional complexity — think whales and dolphins, elephants, and certainly a distinguishing factor between Great Apes and monkeys (in which gibbons are often wrongfully categorized with monkeys). And while we at times value the ecological role an animal plays — think sharks — most often we end up conserving the animals most vital to our well-being. Maybe personally, I feel uneasy that our species can determine the entire ecological balance of the world on such random and self-serving criteria. But that certainly opens another set of even larger questions.
Even so, simply along the lines of utilitarian benefit, gibbons play an important role in human evolutionary biology: as the first primate to both walk bipedally and brachiate, and to develop the complex cognition characteristic of apes, studying the evolutionary pathways can illuminate much greater information on the development of the traits that make us, us. And as one of the only other primates besides humans to exhibit monogamous mating patterns and to sing in duets, such research has and can continue to shed light on what distinguishes us from our ancestors. So perhaps even for just this reason, it’s worth caring about the plight of the gibbon.
When you take a step back, though, and think about just how much time I’ve devoted to this absurd passion that has done nothing but grant me the Facebook messenger nickname “Gibbon girl,” I realize how this seems — overly obsessive. I even turned in an ugly, hard-coded HTML quiz on gibbon conservation awareness for my CS50 (Intro to Computer Science) Final Project! I certainly acknowledge my huge personal biases for a particularly mischievous, charismatic, tree-swinging fella (just check out this heartwarming video). Maybe I’m just a sucker for this underdog of the animal world, overlooked, forgotten, and clinging tightly to survival despite our indifference, though there are many species in similar plights. And this should in no way detract from the absolutely deserved attention of the most prominent conservation stories, like the elephant and his ivory, the tiger roaming in shrinking jungles, or the whale hunted to near extinction.
So in the grand scheme of things, even if gibbons are replaceable, they have still elucidated a much larger underlying issue with regards to academic research as well as the ways in which scientific classifications hold huge implications for the survival of a species, their legal protection, and their prominence in the public eye.
Yet, at the end of the day, devoid of this scientific, biological, societal analysis, I do just think there’s something inexplicably special and captivating about the gibbon.
Gibbons are emotional, extremely intelligent, misunderstood, curious, goofy, mischievous, kind, comical, sensitive, playful, excessively fluffy (why?! they live in the tropics!), adorable, and altogether ridiculous. I can’t walk across a log anymore, arms out, without envisioning this gif/video, and I think about this baby gibbon running around in a diaper with a hat purposefully drawn over its head way more than I should. And I do firmly believe, for reasons as fundamental and lacking the need for justification as the way we value and appreciate our own humanity, the world would be a much worse place without knowing that these beautiful apes are out there swinging around at breakneck speeds from the treetops, singing their duets and yanking tiger tails somewhere in a Southeast Asian jungle, even if one never graces our presence.

If you’d like to read the full paper with citations, here is the Google Drive link.
If you want to help support gibbon conservation, you can check out https://www.gibboncenter.org/.
