The team began observing after hearing stories about gorillas at Zoo Atlanta.
To find out if gorillas make meaningfulsounds, the researchers conducted a simple experiment. Eight gorillas were placed in three different scenarios: in one case, the zookeeper was nearby without food, in another there was only food, and in the third, the zookeeper was holding food in his hands.
The researchers found that gorillas emitteda sound called snough, only when there was a person nearby with food in their hands. Snough is described as a cross between a sneeze and a cough, hence its name, slang for such a sound in English. The authors of the study suggest that its meaning is similar to the human “ahem-ahem.” The goal is to get attention and get food.
The researchers noted that there are unconfirmedevidence that gorillas made similar sounds in other zoos. It is not known if they developed this call themselves or learned it from animals that arrived from other zoos. They added that people are able to invent new sounds or even whole words in order to convey the necessary information to the interlocutors. It is now known that some other animals also have this ability.
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