Many animals, including chimpanzees and bonobos, have food related calls… But aside from anecdotal reports, there was no evidence of this behavior in gorillas, until now. A new paper in PLoS One documents that the wild western lowland gorillas in the Republic of the Congo sing and hum when eating, as a way to express contentment with their meal, as well as for the head of the family to communicate to others that it is chow time.
Song of the jungle Bernd Rohrschneider/FLPA
The first clip demonstrates a steady low-frequency tone that sounds a bit like a sigh of contentment. The second clip sounds like a series of short, differently pitched notes as if someone humming a random melody.
Filed under: Anthropology, Audio, Gorilla, Sociobiology Tagged: behavior, food, Gorilla, primate
