Gorillas Appear to Grieve for Their Dead

[milestogo]

When Tuck and Titus, a pair of dominant silverback mountain gorillas from the same Rwandan social group, died within a year of each other, their primate peers exhibited an array of distressed behaviors suggestive of mourning rituals.

As researchers led by Amy Porter and Damien Caillaud of Atlanta’s Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International report in the journal PeerJ, in the hours and days following the gorillas’ deaths, pack members gathered around their bodies, touching, grooming and otherwise interacting with them. Some males, both adult and juvenile, engaged in antagonistic behaviors, including chest beating, vocalizing, and hitting or kicking the corpse.

A juvenile male who was particularly close with Titus, a 35-year-old male, remained by his body for two days and slept in the same nest as it, while a juvenile son of Tuck, a 38-year-old female, attempted to suckle his mother’s corpse despite already being weaned.

Crucially, George Dvorsky writes for Gizmodo, the scientists found that such expressions of apparent grief extended beyond members of the same social group. When a pack of silverback Grauer’s gorillas chanced upon the body of an unknown primate—albeit one of the same species—in the Democratic Republic of Congo, they circled around it, alternately staring at and grooming the remains. Although this fallen stranger did not receive the same level of attention as Titus and Tuck, he was, as Inverse’s Sarah Sloat writes, “still seen.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/gorillas-appear-grieve-their-dead-180971896/

[mopinko]

1. my son and i used to debate evolutionary psychology,

exploring the strands of the theory down to who does the dishes.
one thing he concluded was- it's a pity we descended from chimps, and not gorillas.

but then again, perhaps evolution demands callousness for the toll.