The Insane Biology of: The Gorilla

for as long as humans have existed there's been an impenetrable barrier between us and the rest of the animal kingdom a barrier of understanding and connection the original language barrier we've made some Headway with animals like dogs who can understand simple commands and there's currently a massive Endeavor to translate whale language into hours a subject we'll talk more about in a future video but when it comes down to sitting face to face with an animal and conversing about thoughts feelings and emotions we've never quite bridged The Divide however the closest we may have ever gotten was with Coco the Western lowland gorilla as an ambassador for her critically endangered species Coco was world renowned for her love of cats friendship with Robin Williams and an incredible ability to communicate through American Sign Language born at the San Francisco Zoo in 1971 Coco was rejected by her mother and became severely ill Stanford University grad student Francine Patterson soon took her in to care for her and taught her sign language as part of her doctorate work in developmental psychology after Decades of work Coco developed a vocabulary of over a thousand words Coco could reason about the world communicate her needs and even grieve other beings she gave us a glimpse of what great apes could be capable of while gorillas aren't our closest living relatives we share about 98 of our DNA with them and even though our brains are larger and more complex gorillas are incredibly smart but if you were to come across a gorilla in the wild your first thought probably wouldn't be about how nuanced and intelligent they are instead you'd probably be telling yourself you've had a good run of it as your life flashed before your eyes gorillas aren't necessarily aggressive to humans but you sure wouldn't want to stick around to find out because gorillas are absolutely gigantic and monstrously strong they're one of the most impressive examples of remarkable intelligence meeting Incredible strength in the animal kingdom gorillas are the largest of the great apes and live in Equatorial Africa there are two species the eastern and western gorillas which are separated by about 560 miles or 900 kilometers of Congo Basin Forest each species has a lowland and Upland subspecies they live in family groups of usually five to ten but sometimes as few as two and up to as many as 50. gorillas are also defined by profound sexual dimorphism with smaller females and super-sized males these giant males lead the family groups and hold the position of Authority for years they're known as Silverbacks due to the saddle of gray or silver hair on the lower part of their back and these adult males are extremely strong an average silverback gorilla can weigh up to 180 kilograms and can easily deadlift over 450 kilograms two and a half times their body weight average humans on the other hand would struggle to deadlift only one times their body weight but the strongest gorillas can lift much more than that it's estimated a gorilla can lift 815 kilograms 4.5 times its body weight the human deadlift record is 501 kilograms 3.3 times his body weight so even accounting for size gorillas are much stronger than human and this is despite the fact that we have a similar muscle mass to weight ratio which is about 38 for human and gorilla males so how are gorillas that much stronger one reason is that the incredible weight of gorillas is supported by denser bones that are more resistant to fractures and breaks bones are made up of three different types of tissue that each perform a different function at the ends is subchondral tissue which is smooth to provide frictionless movement the hard outer shell is made of compact tissue which is strong and able to resist fracture and the interior is cancellous or trabecular tissue which is sponge-like and porous to allow for flexibility compared to humans gorillas cancellous tissue has a higher density making it stronger in addition to their bone composition allowing for their extra strength their bone structure does so as well like other great apes gorillas have straight and continuous brow ridges that stick out over their eyes and males have something called the sagittal Crest which is a bony Ridge at the top of the skull these pronounce bones provide a more extensive muscle attachment area which helps support weaker bones in the skull and reduces strains when chewing hard foods like sticks but the most surprising thing about a gorilla's strength is that they basically don't eat any meat at all to get this yoked gorillas are omnivores but their diet consists mostly of plant matter such as stems bamboo shoots and fruits the only limited amount of animals that they do consume are insects such as ants or termites to digest and absorb nutrients from such a fibrous food source gorillas are equipped with an extra long gut and their hind gut which consists of the cecum and colon make up about half of their total gut volume compared to just 20 percent in humans if you've ever wondered why gorillas have a big pot belly that's why each day they eat about 18 kilograms of food and much of this weight is comprised of the compound cellulose this is the fibrous molecule that gives plants their structure and rigidity and surprisingly this is the secret ingredient gorillas use to get so muscular this is surprising because cellulose itself is just made of lots of sugar molecules changed together there's no protein in it humans can't even digest cellulose it simply passes right through us and technically gorillas can't either at least not by themselves what gorillas have that we do not is a microbiome of bacteria that do readily break down cellulose producing digestible sugars and volatile fatty acids these fatty acids are then taken up by the gorilla and used for energy and to synthesize complex molecules such as protein so it's the bacteria in their gut that provides them with the protein that they need this is a process known as hind gut fermentation and is similar to how horses and cows digest their food and with all this Brawn When Gorillas decide to start throwing punches it can get ugly when two groups meet the leading Silverbacks can sometimes engage in a fight to the death mainly using their sharp canines to cause deep gaping injuries gorillas have a bite force of 9 megapascals stronger than a lion grizzly bear or spotted hyena but fortunately extreme aggression is rare in stable gorilla groups in fact these groups are social collaborative and extremely complex Western lowland gorillas have to travel to find the right food their day begins at dawn and they set off into the forest led by a Silverback male they eat as they walk along and if they find a fruit tree they'll climb its branches to get to the fruit once they're done for the day they demonstrate a remarkable Behavior each gorilla builds a nest on the ground and sleeps there for the night by all appearances this looks like tool use but scientists don't all agree to understand more about Guerrilla behavior and social structures I talked to Dr Robin Morrison postdoctoral research fellow at the Diane Fosse gorilla fund The Nest is one of the most complex tools you use it it's really important but it's not classically been termed as a tool but gorillas build a nest every day and you can see that the small ones will try and do it they're learning and it'll be a bit of a mess and it won't be as good so there is real kind of skill involved involved in building these nests and they are pretty comfy while nest building by gorillas might be considered tool use rather than animal architecture in other contexts tool use is rarely seen by wild gorillas especially when compared to other ape species such as chimps and bonobos in fact because gorillas live in what some scientists have called the great salad bowl where their favorite foods are plentiful for a long time it was thought that gorillas didn't use tools besides nests in the wild at all that is until 2005. at an observation site in the northern Congo scientists watched as one female gorilla used a walking stick to test the water depth in front of her as she waded into a pool and another female from a different troop used a large Branch to balance herself as she foraged for aquatic plants and then used it as a bridge to help her cross a swampy patch of land more recently in 2013 researchers watched a mother gorilla sitting in a bamboo Thicket hold on to a bamboo pole as her infant on the ground below climbed up it to reach her these researchers suggested that unlike other ape species gorillas primarily use tools to overcome physical obstacles rather than to acquire food so gorillas do seem to use tools and use them very proficiently and in captivity this has been observed even more extensively Studies have demonstrated their ability to use sticks to extract food from various devices and researchers have documented the spontaneous use of sticks to attain food from Out Of Reach locations infant gorillas learn how to use tools build nests and other behaviors by watching and imitating the others in the group in particular their mothers in fact family groups are tightly bonded and spend evenings grazing playing and resting together and one of the most important factors in this group's bonding and success is the leader of the group the Silverback male this was exemplified by a study carried out to investigate how young gorillas fared if their mothers died early in their lives they expected young gorillas to fare worse in life if they lost their mother but to their surprise this was not the case if the babies were no longer dependent on their mother's milk they did just fine we think this is is mostly because the dominant males do a lot of caring which is also a little bit unusual in primates so they take on a lot of caring responsibilities they'll have little crashes of all the little gorillas that are kind of running around them or climbing up on them um and especially if there's gorillas that have lost their mothers then they are kind of extra caring towards them and they might share their nest at night with them or they might carry them when they've got to move a long way and we have found that actually the females prefer males that are much more caring towards young gorillas so it might actually be kind of sexual selection it might be these females that are choosing these males that are nice towards the babies because that then helps them you know reproduce more too and part of the social glue that keeps gorillas bound so tightly is the communication they have with one another they do so through a variety of methods including facial expressions such as the play face that indicates they want to play or well-known gestures like the beating of their chest as a sign of aggression mission Dr Joanne Tanner who is a former volunteer companion to Coco studied the gestures made by gorillas at the San Francisco Zoo she categorized what she observed as either a tactile visual audible or iconic gesture she found that gestures can be unique to a group or even just to an individual she also discovered that most of the time gorillas used multiple gestures in a sequence similar to a phrase or sentence they also displayed back and forth communication sort of like a dialogue based on what she saw she surmised that gestures are an efficient way to Foster social relationships they improved social interaction and even possibly enhanced reproductive success and gorillas are also extremely vocal there are quite a big range of especially vocalizations um with the with the gorillas that we study we we know the context they're used in right so often when we go into the group we'll make these kind of grunting sounds which are we think at least pretty reassuring that just telling the gorillas kind of where we are and that they're like very non-threatening sounds and sometimes these vocalizations sound quite familiar one of my personal favorites is that gorillas will often hum when they're eating and we think it might be foods that they kind of particularly enjoy we may not know everything that gorillas are trying to say but sometimes it's easy to make a pretty good guess but what more might gorillas be capable of some researchers think that gorilla communication skills don't stop there that they may be able to speak with us as well using our own language motivated by the pioneering work of psychologists Alan and Beatrix Gardner who taught American Sign Language to a chimpanzee graduate researcher Francine Patterson started teaching Coco the gorilla American sign language in 1972. she did this the same way you would teach a child by modeling the sign and its meaning and molding their hands into the correct orientation and movement and in just a few weeks Coco began learning to sign she learned new signs at about the same rate as a human child and over the course of her life Coco spontaneously and accurately used 1100 signs at least once and over 300 signs at least half the days of a month observed by two independent researchers her vocabulary ranged from basic words like food and more to emotions like love and sorry to Concepts like obnoxious and fake there were some signs that Coco herself modified she did this either because of a limitation of gorilla Anatomy such as having shorter thumbs relative to their index finger than humans or because naturally modulating it making it bigger or faster expressed a different emphasis or meaning she also combined signs to represent a word she didn't know the sign for for example she compounded eye and hat for mask and stuck and metal for magnet and Coco relayed a lot more than just her wants and needs she also communicated her feelings revealing an empathy for other creatures this was particularly exemplified with her love of kittens after repeatedly asking for one she was given a kitten that she named all ball she often cradled it in her arms like an infant later the cat sadly died in an accident on hearing about it Coco signed cry bad frown sad and Beyond a seeming emotional intelligence Coco also appeared to have the ability to lie which to scientists was a really big deal one day she sat on the kitchen sink and ripped it off the wall when asked who did it 127 kilograms cocoa pointed to a member of Staff who weighed 40 kilograms and blamed her scientists thought that at last they had found a way for an animal to communicate her own inner self her own thoughts feelings and emotions that the barrier had at last been broken however many have questioned whether Coco was really speaking through sign language or rather just mimicking the signs as a means to get a reward that she was doing nothing more remarkable than what a dog does when it's told to sit or stay that the hand symbols she learned were empty signifiers that she learned to piece together to get what she wants not that she actually knew what they meant that perhaps she was just articulate enough for us to project our own ideas of what we thought she might be saying some say Coco's sign language has been totally debunked but others still stand by it completely the debate has been raging for 30 years but personally I feel like the real truth lies somewhere in the middle perhaps Coco isn't using language in the exact way we do and perhaps we can't exactly call it language but for the people who spent decades with Coco it was clear that she had a level of empathy and understanding that's hard to refute that she used phrases in unique ways and used them to articulately ask for the things that she needed that she cared deeply for the people around her that she seemed to make jokes and even laugh at them and Coco's Legacy is still in motion the gorilla Foundation is currently digitizing and analyzing thousands of hours of video footage to allow others to build on their research interspecies communication is a tool that allows us to understand the minds of gorillas in a way that leads to better conditions for them in captivity increased empathy for them in the wild where they're critically endangered and a greater understanding of the extraordinary emotional and intellectual capabilities of our fellow great apes and maybe instead of forcing Coco to communicate in a manner that was alien to her species we could have learned more by learning her language perhaps maybe in the grunts and gestures there's more there than we even realize scientists today are painstakingly studying the communication of wild primates to understand what they might be saying because who knows what they can teach us if we take the time to understand the world gets so much richer and more exciting the more we understand it from interpreting the communication of other species to learn more about them to dissecting genomes to trace our evolutionary history to modeling neurons with computers to unlock 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Channel: Real Science

Views: 594,513

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Id: LXnCCq6dkm8

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023