Finally, we learned why gorillas beat their chest when they screamed | the Chronicle

All fans of series and films Tarzan, featuring such a wide range of actors ranging from Ron ely until Alexandre skarsgard, through the legendary Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weismüller, they will know that the character in question announced his presence with a screams as he fights his chest with his clenched fists. It was a way of expressing his identification with the different species of monkeys and primates that inhabit the African jungle.

A further step in this direction, a group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, based in the German city of Leipzig, accompanied by other world-class academics, solved the riddle of why do gorillas fight their chest when they scream.

As they concluded, the strategy of the chest strikes serves as a reliable indicator of the gorilla body size and reveals their competitive capacity compared to other members of the group. By this signal, each animal warns of its size to the others.

The report published in the magazine Scientific reports mentions that the anatomy close to the larynx of larger males reduces the sound frequency produced by these monkeys beating their chest. So, rival males might be intimidated by the sound of these blows – which can be heard a mile away – and choose to avoid a fight with the sending male, while females could use the information to choose. a partner.

The team recorded the gorilla chest shots analyze various sound parameters (duration, quantity, frequency of emission) and study the width of the back of each animal from photographs taken in the Volcanoes National Park of Rwanda, where the fieldwork was developed.

the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei), one of the African great apes on which the fieldwork was done, is an endangered subspecies of which less than 1000 specimens remain in the Impenetrable Forest National Park of Bwindi (Uganda) and the Virunga mountains, between the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda.