Headlight shy, not incompetent
Big, strong and comparatively not very clever - gorillas don't do quite as well in the primate comparison to humans, chimpanzees and orangutans. Wrongly so, because apparently a few abilities are not quite so exclusively distributed in the crown branches of creation.
Everyone does it, says Cole Porter in the lyrics of the song: Birds do it, Bees do it, even educated fleas do it: they fall in love! Many stanzas follow about many animals, all of which, according to Mister Porter, share competence in matters of love with Homo sapiens. Change of style: If behavior researchers had written a song about tool use a few years ago, it would have been shorter: Humans do it. Point. Love is apparently more widespread in Schlager and biology than the ability to make life easier with the clever use of instruments.
However, in recent years of benevolent scientific field research, a few animal tool-specialist species have made the short list behind humans: a few clever birds (ravens, for example), plus some dolphins, otters and octopuses, and of course ours closest ape relatives. The latter case is viewed with ambivalence, because only chimpanzees and orangutans are considered to be really resourceful tool users, not gorillas.
Gorilla gorilla is hardly lacking in mental ability: In zoos and other more artificial environments, he too can learn to "specifically change the shape, position and condition of an object with another, moving object in his environment" - the classic definition of the use of tools, which also has six subcategories, such as the discipline "throwing objects" or "using objects for personal hygiene". According to the experts, only captive gorillas can get anywhere near as high a tinkering score as skilled orangutans and chimpanzees, who also use their skills in the wild.
But why do gorillas in the wild apparently not value the use of tools? Thomas Breuer from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and his colleagues went in search of answers in the swamp forests of the Congo. Do the animals perhaps renounce dexterity because their imposing physique allows them to achieve just as much with violence? After all, unlike the average chimpanzee, they can also break down termite mounds and bite nuts when looking for food - so why bother fishing for termites with a stick or smashing fruit shells with a stone hammer.
At least two female gorillas now proved to the surprised behavior observers around Breuer that the use of tools is by no means only something for weaklings. Both female monkeys belong to gorilla hordes whose more or less eventful lives researchers have been observing from a considerate distance for several years. Then came the fall of 2004 and sensational things could be captured on film.
9. October, female gorilla Leah enters, take the first one: The adult animal stares into the dark water of a pond for a while, then takes a few careful steps on two legs and realizes that it is probably deeper than expected. Just how deep? Not an impossible task for cautious and imaginative gorilla females, Leah proves: She grabs a one-meter-long feeler stick and uses it, slowly groping forward, to probe the shallows ahead for about ten meters - until finally a cry from the offspring calls her back to the shore. Definitely Gorilla Tool Use, Remote Sensing category. An isolated case?
21. November 2004, different place, different group of gorillas: Enter Efi. Initially, quite roughly, as is typical for gorillas, she plucks a leafless, almost one and a half meter long branch out of the nearby deadwood with both hands, but then rams it vertically into the swampy ground - as a support stick that you can hold on to with one hand while the other hand seeks all sorts of tasty things Foliage digs. Then she proves that a branch can also turn from a support pole into a footrest: in order to safely cross the swamp in front of her and not sink in, she laid the stick flat over the ground as a bridge and then walked up and along it onto solid ground. That could almost pass for tool recycling.
One thing is certain based on these documented observations, say Breuer and colleagues: gorillas are also capable of using tools in the wild. To do this, however, they apparently demand an ecological necessity: while chimpanzees face challenges in obtaining food that can be tackled with tools, gorillas tend to be forced into technical innovations by a difficult living environment - for example, a swampy terrain like in northern Congo, which the movement difficult.
The great apes don't despise tools per se in the wild – if there's a good reason for it. From this perspective, perhaps not humans have gorillas, but gorillas have an edge over humans in effective tool use. The ecological necessity of using an orange peeler, a table vacuum cleaner or a pasta timer that cooks with you is not obvious at first glance.
