Great apes learn from their peers how to be good mothers. The zoo wants the young gorillas to experience other females having babies and to see how they care for their offspring before they have their own. When a zoo wants a female gorilla to get pregnant, it passes the female on to another zoo as soon as the animals reach puberty - in keeping with the incest taboo.įemale gorilla newcomers to the Wilhelma are put on the pill. In the wild, when they've reached the right age, they leave their group, and choose a new group with a silverback who appeals to them. Mother and child Image: picture-alliance/dpa/H.Battefeldįemale gorillas usually don't mate with their closest relatives, their father and brothers. That said, Wilhelma chose to build a moat - fenced by an electric wire and complete with a non-swimmer's area - in the new great ape house. As a result, zoos have to think twice about using water-filled moats around their compounds because they could easily drown. Some female orangutans have sad lives indeed. The fact that great apes resemble humans has its disadvantages for the animals, however: sometimes, they are treated as prostitutes and are being sexually abused, tied down in questionable brothels. "The bonobos go nuts - they shake their fists and shriek." What they can't stand is when the zoo vet shows up in the TV program. The keeper says they (mostly) love this: "When we showed them a documentary from our zoo, they really liked that!" They're really interested in other animals, she adds. The apes are allowed an hour of movies a day on a large screen on a wall in their compound. Is this chimpanzee laughing? Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P.KnechtĪt the Wilhelma zoo, US primate researcher Amy Parish studies Bonobos' reactions to TV films. Words other great apes came up with: "ball" and "beans" to denote "peas," "bottle" and "match" to say "lighter," and "bark" in combination with "sky" and "dog" to refer to a helicopter.Ī zookeeper told us that gorillas in particular swear a lot if you teach them the signs for swear words. A female gorilla once combined the signs for white and tiger to describe a zebra: a white animal with stripes. They can't form complex sentences, but they do create new words. Some apes know how to use more than a thousand signs. Perhaps that's why they are able to grasp human sign language. Scans of great ape brains show a kind of preliminary speech center. DW author Brigitte Osterath on the look-out for mountain gorillas in Uganda Image: Rainer Dückerhoff In addition, the great apes' larynx muscles and vocal chords can't move as freely and are therefore hard to coordinate. The same is actually true for human babies before they learn to speak. In reality, they can't speak at all because they have a higher larynx, or voice box, which means there isn't enough space between the soft palate and the larynx - the resonating cavity is simply too small. In the movie "Planet of the Apes", gorillas, chimps and orangutans speak like humans. Great apes can also easily catch a cold or the flu from humans. According to one of their keepers, "they cough and sniffle all the time." As a result, the Bonobos at the Wilhelma zoo aren't allowed outdoors once the temperatures drop. These slender, placid great apes are prone to catching common colds. Fishing for snacks Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Zoo Berlin Their blood differs in too many details that still need to be investigated. In reality, blood donations are unlikely, though, as humans and apes are different species. The ABO varieties and the Rhesus factor are the most important characteristics that decide over whether a blood transfusion will succeed or fail. So in theory, chimpanzees and gorillas could donate blood to humans and vice versa - provided they have the same blood type. The Rhesus factor isn't limited to humans, either. Even some of the lesser apes like Gibbons have these blood types. These types developed more than 20 million years ago they're something humans and all Old World monkeys share. Great apes and humans have the same blood types: A, B, AB and O. But then I took a tour around the new great ape house at Stuttgart's Wilhelma zoo and botanical garden - and found out that these fascinating animals still have many a story to tell. Think you know everything there is to know about great apes? That's what I thought, too.
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