Gorillas may have evolved a way to beat a cheating berry plant
Gorillas may have evolved a way to beat a cheating berry plant
Daily news
13 July 2016
©2015 Chris Whittier
By Karl Gruber
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… Well, it looks like gorillas don’t get fooled twice, at least not by a cheating plant.
If true, that makes them smarter than humans and almost 50 other primate species all of whom can be tricked by a West African plant that grows super-sweet but low-calorie berries.
Pentadiplandra brazzeana’s fruit is packed with a protein called brazzein, which mimics the taste of high-energy sugary fruits, but costs the plant less to make. So sweet is brazzein that it’s even been suggested as a new artificial sweetener for human consumption. The problem for hungry primates is that it’s mostly a waste of time eating the plant’s fruit.
Brenda Bradley, an anthropologist at George Washington University, thinks the plant is probably producing cheap, sweet proteins to “trick” African primates into eating the low-calorie berries and dispersing their seeds.
More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2097355-gorillas-may-have-evolved-a-way-to-beat-a-cheating-berry-plant/
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Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals
Daily news
24 February 2016
By Brian Owens
Gorillas sing and hum when eating, a discovery that could help shed light on how language evolved in early humans.
Singing seems to be a way for gorillas to express contentment with their meal, as well as for the head of the family to communicate to others that it is dinner time.
Food-related calls have been documented in many animals, including chimpanzees and bonobos, but aside from anecdotal reports from zoos, there was no evidence of it in gorillas.
To see if they make these noises in the wild, Eva Luef, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, observed two groups of wild western lowland gorillas in the Republic of the Congo.
More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078781-wild-gorillas-compose-happy-songs-that-they-hum-during-meals/
