The Whistling Ape

Although apes often imitate the physical movements of humans, many scientists have argued that the primates have no control over their vocalizations, and that the sounds they emit are purely emotional (such as an involuntary response to predators, or the racket chimpanzees make when their territory is invaded).  But these entrenched beliefs may soon fall to the wayside because of a 30-year-old orangutan who lives at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C.  Her name is Bonnie.  And she's taught herself how to whistle.

From National Geographic News:  Lisa Stevens, the zoo's curator for great apes and giant pandas, said the key point is that the orangutan was not trained to whistle.  While orangutans can be taught new sounds with extensive training, Bonnie is the first indication that the animals can independently pick up the sounds from other species.  "It's something she spontaneously developed," Stevens said. "It wasn't a trick."  

Dr. Serge Wich of Iowa's Great Ape Trust recently presented his research to a symposium at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.  "We know they are capable of imitating these motor skills, but we never had any good indication of sounds for vocalization," said Wich.  "Now at least we have an indication that they can imitate sounds without being trained.  In addition, it counters a long-held assumption that non-human primates have fairly fixed sound repertoires that are not under voluntary control.  Being able to learn new sounds and use these voluntarily are also two important aspects of human speech...  The next step is to study how flexible sound-learning is in apes and whether they can adjust their sounds—pitch and intonation, for instance—depending on the context."   It's believed that Bonnie taught herself to whistle from listening to one of her caretakers.  From the Great Ape Trust:  Bonnie appears to whistle for the sake of making a sound rather than to receive a food reward or some other incentive. If asked to whistle, she is likely to oblige, another indication to scientists that she makes the sound voluntarily.  In their paper, Wich and his colleagues also shared anecdotal information about Indah, a female orangutan who lived with Bonnie at the National Zoo before moving to Great Ape Trust in 2004.  Indah also began to whistle some years after Bonnie was first observed making the sound in the late 1980s, but Indah died before recordings could be made of her whistles.  Scientists believe that Indah’s whistling was a vocalization learned from Bonnie.  Watch Bonnie whistle:

Comments

[Samuel Wright]

makes send that he should be able to whistle, he has lips after all