If you remember the Cadbury ad campaign of 2007, then consider this a parody. If you don’t, well then it’s Chewbacca playing a Phil Collins song on drums, which is awesome enough, right? -Thanks, Nick!

A Gorilla is given a video camera… this isn’t the beginning of a joke, but rather an interesting experiment to see things from the Gorilla’s perspective. At the link you can see the Gorilla home video.

A gorilla at the UK’s Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust was recently given a video camera, and you can see the results in the video up top. Honestly, the gorilla’s cinematography is way more coherent than most action movies. Not to be outdone by a bunch of macaque photography enthusiasts, staff at the Jersey wildlife trust gave an HD camera to a 27-year-old Silverback gorilla named Ya Kwanza. The camera was covered in oats and honey to attract Ya Kwanza’s attention, and it was encased in an indestructible box so that the gorilla couldn’t have too fun with it.

Link

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Random acts of violence are not funny. They aren’t.  And the attack of a gorilla mascot in a Wireless Center in Strongsville, OH, last week is not funny. According to Fox8:

[T]he store has the gorilla as a marketing tool a couple of days a week. Brandon Parham, the store manager, told the TV station that he had seen the kid inside the store prior to the attack.

“Then he just emerged, dressed up as a banana, and sprinted as fast as he could at our gorilla,” Parham said. “The kid just speared our gorilla.”

Meantime, the store manager feels his guy got a bad deal: “The gorilla should have won,” Parham said.

Link

YouTube Link

Ambam the gorilla stands upright and walks like a man.  Ambam is a 21-year-old silverback male gorilla.  He lives at Kent animal park in Britain. You may have already seen this handsome fellow as he has quickly become an internet sensation.

National Geographic photographer Ian Nichols captured this image of a seemingly contemplative Silverback gorilla. What do you think it’s thinking about? Thanks Marilyn!

On Tuesday, the gorilla was reported stolen from the roof of First Kia, 2081 First St., said Sgt. Ritchie Lew, a Simi Valley police spokesman. It was last seen Friday afternoon.

The gorilla is sometimes deflated when it’s windy, and the dealership’s employees assumed that’s what had happened until someone climbed onto the roof Tuesday and discovered it was missing, said Yehuda Riess, a used car manager there.

Riess said he has no clue why thieves targeted the gorilla, or how they made off with the roughly 350-pound inflatable primate.

“It’s not something you can just go up on the roof and steal it,” he said, adding the gorilla was tethered down by cables. “It would take at least a few people to carry it.”

Link

Christina Spicuzza of Spicuzza Photo A Day went to the San Francisco Zoo last week and snapped this priceless photo of an inquisitive pair of gorillas playing with a Nintendo DS that someone had accidentally dropped into their habitat:

The gorilla tried all he could to figure the thing out turning it forward, backwards and holding it really close to his head. A trainer at the zoo was able to trade the DS for an apple and gave the console back to the boy who dropped it. It reportedly still worked though it was scratched and covered with gorilla slobber.

Link | Christina’s Blog | More photos on Flickr

To study play-fighting among gorillas, scientists analyzed videos of 21 of the apes from six colonies in five European zoos collected over the course of three years.

In their games, "not only did the gorillas in our study hit their playmates and then run away chased by their playmates, but they also switched their roles when hit so the chaser became the chased and vice versa," said researcher Marina Davila Ross, a behavioral biologist at the University of Portsmouth in England. "There are a lot of similarities with the children’s game of tag." [...]

Instead of letting what might be a fair trade of blows happen, these hit-and-run games were shows of relatively unfair behavior, where the gorilla who starts the game tries to get away with tagging a fellow playmate without getting hit in return. Such games likely help the apes — and humans — learn how to deal with real conflict by testing what is acceptable with a safe crowd of peers and even parents, Davila Ross said.

Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience has more: Link (Photo: Elke Zimmermann)

Trivia for you: "Gorilla" comes from the Greek word meaning "tribe of hairy women." The animal was first described by Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian navigator in 480 BC.

(YouTube Link)

Remember the heartwarming reunion between Christian the Lion and the men who raised him? A similar encounter happened when Damian Aspinall went looking for a gorilla, Kwibi, he had raised and released into the wild.

Kwibi grew up with Damian at his Howletts Wild Animal Park in England. When he was five, he was released into the forests of Gabon, West Africa as part of conservation programme to re-introduce gorillas back into the wild. Now Kwibi’s 10 years old, much bigger and stronger. Will Damian find him? Will Kwibi attack him?

Discover more about his work at The Aspinall Foundation.  (via Bits and Pieces)

Female gorillas use sex as a tactic to thwart their rivals, new research suggests. Pregnant apes court their silverback male to stop other females conceiving.

"It seems to us that mating is another tactic that females use to compete with each other – in this case to gain favour with another male," says Diane Doran-Sheehy, a primatologist at Stony Brook University in New York.

Her team chronicled the sex lives of five female western lowland gorillas and one silverback almost every day for more than three years. "We wondered if, basically, [pregnant] females can mimic [ovulating] females and dupe the male into mating with them and distract him from what those other girls are doing," Doran-Sheehy says.

This kind of competitive behaviour may even help explain how humans evolved into a mostly monogamous species, she says.

Ewen Callaway of New Scientists has more: Link

Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits

Roughly 8,000 AOL subscribers joined the chat, which featured Koko, who signed her answers; Patterson, who interpreted them; and an AOL chat facilitator.

As the transcript clearly shows, Koko’s responses were a bit vague, but no more inane than some of the drivel littering Facebook pages these days.

Link

Also check out Koko’s website, which includes a transcript of the AOL chat. (Thank, Gauldar!)

Gorilla keeper Michael Rozzi said: “We feed the gorillas brussel sprouts during the winter because they are packed with vitamin C and have great nutritional benefits.

“Unfortunately, an embarrassing side effect is that it can cause bouts of flatulence in humans and animals alike.

“However, I don’t think any of us were prepared for a smell that strong.”

The zoo has taken the sprouts off the menu while the zoo is open to the public. The gorillas will enjoy them when the zoo is closed on Christmas Day. Link -Thanks, Rich!