Male Orangutans With More Padded Cheeks Look Sweeter To The Ladies

What should be the physical biodata of a ladies' oragutan? If you are a male orangutan, what body parts should you have?

Just a huge body, one "pendulous throat sac" and cute cheek pads. Throat sacs help you to call your girlfriends with long, deep, clear calls, and having fleshy cheek pads make you look attractive to women.

According to new research from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology,  scientists explained that some orangutans develop cheek pads, which influences them to father babies, according to natureworldnews.

One guy became the centre of study for eight years, for Graham L. Banes and Linda Vigilant. They examined an orangutan called Kusasi, earlier a dominant male at Camp Leakey in Indonesia's Tanjung Puting National Park.

Comparing his reproductive success, they found that Kusasi seemed to get more girlfriends than other orangs. To understand his "reproductive success", they collected fecal samples and subjected him to some paternity tests, finally concluding that during his "dominance"s, he produced more offspring than any other male. The secret of his success was his cute, fat cheekpads.

"We performed paternity testing to see which of these males were fathering offspring at Camp Leakey, and to quantify Kusasi's reproductive success," Vigilant said in the news release. "Paternity could be assigned to 14 candidate offspring, conceived across multiple decades, ten of which were fathered by Kusasi."

In an area, just one male orangutan is allowed to have them, though! He is the dominate orangutan, which helped him to attract more females and get more offspring.

"The timing, however, was interesting," Banes said. "These other males were typically reproductively successful at the beginning and end of Kusasi's dominant period, when the hierarchy was potentially unclear."