Bangkok, Thailand – Wah, wow, hoo! Turns out humans aren’t the only primates using songs to warn of life’s dangers and travails.
White-handed gibbons in Thailand’s forests have been found to communicate threats from predators by singing – the first time the behavior has been discovered among nonhuman primates, researchers said Wednesday.
While other animals have been shown to use song to attract mates or signal danger, researchers writing in this month’s science journal PLoS One said their study was the first to show gibbons – slender, tree- dwelling apes – issuing songlike warnings to each other.
“This work is a really good indicator that nonhuman primates are able to use combinations of calls … to relay new and, in this case, potentially lifesaving information to one another,” said Esther Clarke, a University of St. Andrews graduate student and co-author of the study.
Along with Klaus Zuberbuhler from St. Andrews in Scotland and Ulrich Reichard of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Clarke spent 2004 and 2005 at Khao Yai National Park in Thailand observing gibbons.
Mostly black with a white face, gibbons live in the treetops and are known for issuing elaborate hooting sounds that echo across the forest for up to a half- mile to advertise pair bonds or attract mates.
The team put models of predators – snow leopards, pythons and crested serpent eagles – near a group of gibbons and then made audio recordings of their response. What they found, Clarke said, is that the gibbons approached the potential predator and began warbling a series of sounds – “wahs, wows and hoos” – that were picked up by other gibbons, which then repeated the calls to others.
