The White Handed Gibbon varies from black and dark-brown to light-brown, sandy colours. Their hands and feet are white-coloured and a ring of white hair surrounds the black face. They are true brachiators, propelling themselves through the forest by swinging under the branches using their extremely long arms and curved fingers on elongated hands. They subsist principally upon fruit and leaves, with insects and flowers forming the remainder of their diet in the dipterocarp forest, including primary lowland and submontane rainforest, mixed deciduous bamboo forest, and seasonal evergreen forest of Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand. Family groups inhabit a firm territory, which they protect by warding off other gibbons with their calls each morning. Each species has a typified call and each breeding pair has unique variations on that theme. Mating occurs in every month of the year, but most conceptions occur during the dry season in March, with a peak in births during the late rainy season, in October. On average, females reproduce for the first time at about 11 years of age, gestation is six months long, and pregnancies are usually of a single young. Young are nursed for approximately two years, and full maturity comes at about eight years. Their life expectancy is about 25 years. The white-handed gibbon is threatened in various ways: they are sometimes hunted for their meat, sometimes a parent is killed to capture young animals for pets or to be imprisoned in zoos, but perhaps the most pervasive is the loss of habitat through forest clearance for the construction of roads, shifting agriculture, ecotourism, domesticated cattle and elephants, forest fires, subsistence logging, illegal logging, new village settlement, and palm oil plantations.