If chimpanzees, orangutans and now gorillas can all create novel vocalizations, an ability present in humans but rare across the animal kingdom, it’s possible that the ancestor of these animals and humans did as well, he says.Ĭlay thinks that studying gorillas might offer new clues about what drives language development. “There’s a bit of a gap in our understanding,” Taglialatela says. Chimpanzees in captivity can blow “raspberries” and orangutans can whistle, but gorillas’ calls aren’t as well-studied. To date, most research on great apes’ vocal repertoires has been limited to gorillas’ charismatic cousins. If the gorillas want something they can’t physically reach, they may be “trying to use communicative signals to manipulate humans” into helping, says Jared Taglialatela, an evolutionary biologist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia who was not involved with the study. “Coughing and sneezing are signs of a cold, which are signals that caregivers pay specific attention to,” she says. Those animals probably didn’t learn to snough from the Zoo Atlanta gorillas, because they’ve never been exposed to one another, Salmi says.Īt this point, her team can only speculate how the snough originated, though she notes that a sneezy cough might work particularly well to snare a keeper’s notice. Surveys from 19 zoos across the United States and Canada revealed that other gorillas make the same snuffling sound. “That’s quite decent evidence of the animals’ intention to request something from the keeper,” says Zanna Clay, a primatologist at Durham University in England who was not involved with the work.Īnd the snoughing wasn’t limited to Zoo Atlanta gorillas. In an enclosure at Zoo Atlanta, Sukari the gorilla makes a call that sounds something like a sneeze and a cough - a “snough.” Sukari and other zoo gorillas used the sound most often when zookeepers with food were near. When the gorillas saw just grapes or just the keeper, they stayed mostly silent. And they made other noises that can draw human attention, like clapping, chest-beating or banging on the enclosure. Gorillas snoughed most when both the keeper and the food sat nearby, the team found. Thousands of new, high-quality pictures added every day. So they recorded eight western lowland gorillas at Zoo Atlanta in three different scenarios: when a bucket of fresh grapes, a keeper or a keeper holding the grapes sat outside the enclosure. Find Angry Gorilla stock images in HD and millions of other royalty-free stock photos, illustrations and vectors in the Shutterstock collection.
Salmi and her colleagues wondered if the animals snoughed at other times too. And it seemed to crop up only in a specific situation - when keepers showed up with food. As the animals wheeze out the noise, they open their mouths wide, almost as if they’re preparing to yodel. Gorillas utter an assortment of calls, but the snough stood out. Salmi first encountered the snough years ago at Zoo Atlanta, when she and a zookeeper noticed the gorillas making a strange sound.
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