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If you like to play the game of tag when you were a little kid, you’d get a kick out of this: scientists have discovered that gorillas also play it!
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.
Forget DNA! Scientists have re-traced our evolutionary tree and confirmed human’s relationship to fellow apes through laughter.
Who says you can’t learn anything by tickling chimps?
To investigate that, Marina Davila Ross of the University of Portsmouth in England and colleagues carried out a detailed analysis of the sounds evoked by tickling three human babies and 21 orangutans, gorillas, chimps and bonobos.
After measuring 11 traits in the sound from each species, they mapped out how these sounds appeared to be related to each other. The result looked like a family tree. Significantly, that tree matched the way the species themselves are related, the scientists reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
They also concluded that while human laughter sounds much different from the ape versions, its distinctive features could well have arisen from shared ancestral traits.
After measuring 11 traits in the sound from each species, they mapped out how these sounds appeared to be related to each other. The result looked like a family tree. Significantly, that tree matched the way the species themselves are related, the scientists reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
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