Sweet Yet Sour

Number 5 – The Gibbons

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 | Weird Things

Okay, back to the weird/interesting things about Dorrie list. Here’s number 5.

I am proud to say that once, I was hit in the head by an ape.

In college I majored in anthropology, which has a few areas from which to choose your focus.  Anthropology includes cultural anthropology – where you can do a Margaret Mead thing and go live with the natives, and archaeology – where you spend days using a paint brush in the dirt to reveal ancient trash.  There is also forensic anthropology – the study of human bones, and evolutionary anthropology – where you learn that you can call someone “Australopithecus” and they won’t know that you are calling them “Ape Man”.  The other area of anthropology is primatology – the study of primates.

I was really fascinated with forensic anthropology and I had a great professor who was a nationally known expert.  While I was a student he helped to identify the remains of a 12-year old girl who had been murdered and dumped in the mountains by her neighbor.  But I decided my junior year to focus on primatology.

In order to complete the graduation requirements the anthropology department at Colorado College requires that you do one of two things.  Either take a test about all of the areas of anthropology or complete a research thesis documented with a paper and a presentation.  I chose the thesis because I have never been a good test taker; I’m a much better writer.

For my thesis I chose to focus on gibbons and their calls.  Gibbons are a “lesser” ape (in contrast to Gorillas for example, which are a “Greater” ape), native to Borneo and Sumatra.  Gibbons spend almost all of their lives in the trees, they live in family groups of mom, pop and babies, with each family having their own territory.  In the wild, each morning the male and female gibbon do a series of calls while circling the edges of their territory in sort of a “this is our house” statement. I found a YouTube video of a female gibbon so that you can hear an example of what gibbons sound like when they call.

During the morning call session the male and female have very specific parts; it’s as if it’s a scripted song.  For my thesis I wanted to research whether captive gibbons do the same calls and if they do if it’s the same as the calls that wild gibbons perform each morning.

I studied three pairs of White-handed gibbons at three different zoos.  Spike and Ebony at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Rocket and Suzy at the Heritage Zoo (in Grand Island, Nebraska), and Ralph and Lucky at Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.  Of these gibbons, only Ralph was born in the wild.

Studying gibbon calls means that you arrive at the zoo by dawn – since that’s when the calls start and spend all day observing them.  I would bring a chair, a tape recorder, and a special form to take down every move that the gibbons made under my observation. When they moved, I wrote down what they were doing and for how long.

Just as a side note, being outside all day writing down gibbon movement during the summer in Nebraska has two downsides: a) It’s freaking hot – like 105 degrees with 100% humidity, and, b) Gibbons, being pretty intelligent, know that the best thing to do when it’s hot is too sleep in the shade.  I spent hours writing “sleeping” on my observation notes when all I wanted to do was find air conditioning.

I discovered that gibbons perform pretty much the same calls in captivity as they do in the wild – which was good since that was my hypothesis. The male and females sang their parts at exactly the same time each morning and didn’t really deviate from the song performed in the wild.

I also discovered that you can very easily piss off a male gibbon if you mess with his baby.  Rocket and Suzy, the pair in Grand Island, had a cute 1-year old baby named Bubba Sue.  (Don’t ask, because I do not know the logic on the silly name.)  At the zoo I was allowed to sit next to the cage within a few feet of the gibbons.  One day Bubba Sue was playing in the cage near me and decided that a small piece of metal wire would be the perfect thing to put in her mouth.  Rocket and Suzy were at the other end of the cage and I didn’t want Bubba Sue to be hurt by the piece of wire.  So, without thinking, I leaned over to take the piece of wire from Bubba Sue.

Here’s the problem, gibbons have really long arms, and can swing 30 feet in one swing.  I was just grabbing the piece of wire from Bubba Sue when I got smacked on the back of my head – hard.  Rocket did not take too kindly to me being close to the baby and in the space of a few seconds had swung across the cage, reached out and taken a good swipe at my head.

Thankfully Rocket wasn’t close enough to bite me, because he would have if he had the chance and gibbons have nice, sharp teeth. And really, I think “once I was hit in the head by an ape”, sounds so much better than “I lost my three of my fingers in an incident with an angry gibbon”, don’t you?

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