26/06/2025
The GIST
Gorillas' tree time rivals chimpanzees: Even silverbacks spend hours foraging above ground.

Bwindi mountain gorillas in Uganda and western lowland gorillas in Gabon spend significantly more time in the trees than previously thought. Credit: Martha Robbins
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, as well as Rocky Vista University (U.S.), show that gorillas spend much more time in the trees than previously thought.
Gorillas are typically considered the most terrestrial of the great apes due to their large body size (males average up to 170 kg or 375 lbs) and a diet comprising primarily terrestrial vegetation. However, new research shows that some gorilla populations can spend just as much time in the trees as some chimpanzee populations. Even large adults can average up to 20% to 30% of their time in the trees to forage on leaves and fruit.
This broader understanding of gorilla behavior has important implications for how we interpret gorilla anatomy, their adaptive ecology, and gorilla-like features in our ape and human fossil relatives. The research is published in the journal Current Biology.
Since the 1974 discovery of "Lucy" in Ethiopia with her bipedal legs and ape-like arms, there has been ongoing debate about the importance of tree climbing in human evolution. Additional fossil discoveries over the last decades have revealed large differences in body size, diet and the paleoenvironments in which our fossil human relatives lived. Therefore, understanding what drives arboreality (spending time in trees) among living apes today is critical for interpreting how important arboreality was for our fossil human ancestors.
Gorillas are typically considered the most terrestrial of the great apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos), often depicted in popular media sitting on the forest floor eating leafy vegetation. Adult females range between 70 and 100 kilograms (155–220 lbs) while silverbacks (adult males)
