Gibbons at Chiang Mai Zoo

Gibbon calls are pretty impressive and I recommend you click on the yellow arrow and listen while you read this post.

AKRaven's 10th mix by AKRaven


Esther Clarke, Ulrich H. Reichard, Klaus Zuberbuhler studied wild gibbon calls at Khao Yai National Park and said:

The vocal abilities of non-human primates are relatively unimpressive in comparison, with gibbon songs being a rare exception. These apes assemble a repertoire of call notes into elaborate songs, which function to repel conspecific intruders, advertise pair bonds, and attract mates. We conducted a series of field experiments with white-handed gibbons** at Khao Yai National Park, Thailand, which showed that this ape species uses songs also to protect themselves against predation. We compared the acoustic structure of predatory-induced songs with regular songs that were given as part of their daily routine. Predator-induced songs were identical to normal songs in the call note repertoire, but we found consistent
differences in how the notes were assembled into songs. The responses of out-of-sight receivers demonstrated that these syntactic differences were meaningful to conspecifics. Our study provides the first evidence of referential signalling in a free-ranging ape species, based on a communication system that utilises combinatorial rules.

These cages do give the gibbons some room to swing around as you can see in the video below, but they are pretty dreary.





Fortunately, the "gibbon island" is scheduled to open later this year. I'm assuming that all the gibbons will get out of these old cages and onto the islands.