Infant-directed communication in lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla): do older animals scaffold communicative competence in infants?

Mother-infant interactions in western Lowland Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla): spatial relationships, communication, and opportunities for social learning.

This study investigated mother-infant interactions in lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) with particular focus on the relative role of mothers and infants in creating situations that are potentially conducive to infant social learning. Eleven gorilla mother-infant dyads were focally observed in weekly 1-hr sessions for 12 months. Spatial relationships were affected by age as well as by ...

Gorilla Mothers Also Matter! New Insights on Social Transmission in Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in Captivity

The present paper describes two distinct behaviors relating to food processing and communication that were observed in a community of five separately housed groups of lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in captivity during two study periods one decade apart: (1) a food processing technique to separate wheat from chaff, the so-called puff-blowing technique; and (2) a male display used to ...

Interunit, environmental and interspecific influences on silverback-group dynamics in western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla)

Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) change their activity patterns in response to frugivory.

The most important environmental factor explaining interspecies variation in ecology and sociality of the great apes is likely to be variation in resource availability. Relatively little is known about the activity patterns of western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), which inhabit a dramatically different environment from the well-studied mountain gorillas (G. beringei beringei). Thi...

Proposal for the Inclusion of Species on the Appendices of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals

The most usual present treatment, however, recognises the western and eastern populations as separate full species, Gorilla gorilla and Gorilla beringei respectively. The eastern and western populations are separated by approximately 1,000 km (Garner and Ryder, 1996). Western and eastern populations can be distinguished based on external features (Groves, 2002) and clear geographic and morpholo...