{"id":171034,"date":"2025-06-09T19:29:16","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T19:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/171034\/"},"modified":"2025-06-09T19:29:16","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T19:29:16","slug":"videos-show-chimpanzees-using-the-forest-as-their-drumkit-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/171034\/","title":{"rendered":"Videos Show Chimpanzees Using The Forest as Their Drumkit : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chimpanzees are a musical lot, and percussion is an important part of their repertoire. But one particular behavior continues to fascinate zoologists: every so often, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes<\/a>) are caught on camera, yelling and throwing rocks at a good, solid tree trunk<\/a>, in what some have even described as a kind of ritual<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Footage collected throughout a nature reserve in Guinea-Bissau across five years shows a series of fascinating variations on this phenomenon, captured by researchers from Wageningen University and the German Primate Research Centre. <\/p>\n

Their records reveal, on multiple occasions, lone adult male chimpanzees hanging out by a sturdy tree trunk before rousing into a frenzy of hoots and hollers that are punctuated by the satisfying ‘thunk’ of solid stone against wood, like the sting of a joke<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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It’s similar to another kind of ‘drumming’ chimps do with their hands or feet on the hollow buttress roots of trees, but this technique follows a different structure, with silence preceding the drumming. ‘Stone-assisted drumming’, as the researchers call it, tends to go the other way round.<\/p>\n

Of course, someone always has to bend the genres: this male seems to have combined drumming and rock-throwing into a more experimental cacophony.<\/p>\n

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In a few instances, these outbursts and their accompanying instrumentation appear to elicit a response from other chimpanzees nearby, which suggests it could be a form of communication used when individuals are further apart.<\/p>\n

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“It may be that these loud, low-frequency sounds are meant to carry further than typical within-group communication,” behavioral biologist Sem van Loon suggests<\/a>. “The acoustic properties of a stone striking a tree make that feasible in densely forested areas.”<\/p>\n

These strange videos may add to our understanding of this percussive behavior, but for now, its true purpose remains a mystery to us humans.<\/p>\n

The research was published in Biology Letters<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chimpanzees are a musical lot, and percussion is an important part of their repertoire. But one particular behavior…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[120,70,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-171034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-msft-content","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}