Wah, wow, hoo! Turns out humans aren’t the only primates using songs to warn of life’s dangers and travails. White-handed gibbons in Thailand’s forests have been found to communicate threats from predators by singing — the first time the behaviour has been discovered among non-human primates, researchers said on Wednesday.
While other animals have been shown to use song to attract mates or signal danger, researchers writing in this month’s science journal PLoS One said their study was the first to show gibbons — a slender, tree-dwelling ape — issuing song-like warnings to each other. “This work is a really good indicator that nonhuman primates are able to use combinations of calls ... to relay news and, in this case, potentially lifesaving information to one another,” said Esther Clarke, a University of St Andrews graduate student and co-author of the study.
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