What Does King Kong Eat?

What Does King Kong Eat? - Although fictional, “King Kong” is the one iconic movie character that everyone knows or, at least, has heard of.

Some have probably even seen all the King Kong films – seven have been released since 1933, another one is coming out this month and an epic Godzilla Vs Kong movie is currently in production. There are also countless TV programmes, theatre shows and books featuring the giant beast that have been around for decades.

A quick search on Wikipedia will give you a pretty good background story of how King Kong came to life; an even quicker Google scan will give you thousands of articles on the ape.

However, there are hardly any stories that focus on King Kong’s diet. An article published by Forbes in 2005 titled The Biology Of King Kong provides a description of what the ape would probably eat if it were real.

“Of course, keeping a big body like that powered would require huge amounts of food. Since Kong is a mammal, his dietary requirements would be quite demanding. Larger animals tend to have lower metabolic rates, but it’s reasonable to expect that Kong would consume truckloads of food every day. Since an average adult male gorilla eats approximately 50 pounds of food daily – about one-eighth of its body weight – we can guess that Kong would need at least 7,500 pounds of food per day. To put that in human terms, that’s about 6,000 heads of lettuce, 15,000 Big Macs or 65,000 Pop-Tarts.” 

Now that’s a lot of food.

Apes generally eat mostly plants and some grubs, bugs and ants but since Kong is a gigantic ape, it doesn’t actually make sense for him to eat grubs. In fact, he wouldn’t even be able to see them let alone pick them up with his big hands! The Forbes article, however, mentions that as Kong lives on an island that is inhabited by “giant, mutant plants”, he’s probably vegetarian.

Well that makes sense.

But the question still remains: What does Kong eat? Take our poll to help us try and figure out the great ape’s diet. Kong: Skull Island opens March 9.