Primate Noise: Brains as Well as Beauty & Brawn: Wild Gorillas Use Tools

The wild gorilla known as Leah uses a walking stick to help her wade in a marshy pond in the Republic of the Congo.

Biologists in Africa have reported the first scientifically observed instances of wild gorillas using tools, a skill previously thought to be limited in the wild to chimpanzees and orangutans. Click here for the full wire-service story.

Here is the abstract from the original paper, published on-line by The Public Library of Science (PLoS):

First Observation of Tool Use in Wild Gorillas
Thomas Breuer, Mireille Ndoundou-Hockemba, Vicki Fishlock
Descriptions of novel tool use by great apes in response to different circumstances aids [sic] us in understanding the factors favoring the evolution of tool use in humans. This paper documents what we believe to be the first two observations of tool use in wild western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla). We first observed an adult female gorilla using a branch as a walking stick to test water deepness and to aid in her attempt to cross a pool of water at Mbeli Bai, a swampy forest clearing in northern Congo. In the second case we saw another adult female using a detached trunk from a small shrub as a stabilizer during food processing. She then used the trunk as a self-made bridge to cross a deep patch of swamp. In contrast to information from other great apes, which mostly show tool use in the context of food extraction, our observations show that in gorillas other factors such as habitat type can stimulate the use of tools.

There are more stunning photos of Leah and Efi, the other tool-using gorilla documented, at the PLoS website. The observations occurred almost exactly a year ago.

This story has a nifty personal dimension for me as well -- my name is also Leah!