LinkNotes: Bonnie, a Whistling Orangutan

2008-12-14

Bonnie, a Whistling Orangutan

Clipped from: The Hindu News Update Service

Orangutan whistles but can't hold a tune

Recently, a keeper was walking past the great ape house at the Smithsonian National Zoo, in Washington DC, when he heard whistling coming from inside. Thinking that one of the zoo's visitors had infiltrated the restricted area, he hurried to investigate. It turned out not to be a person who was making the noise, but one of the ape house's long-time residents, Bonnie, a 30-year-old orangutan.

Clipped from: Meet the Orangutans - National Zoo| FONZ

Bonnie – female
Bonnie, a hybrid, was born in December 1976 at the Albuquerque Zoo and was nursery reared. She came to the Zoo in December 1980. She is the mother of Kiko. She travels the O Line.

Distinguishing features
Bonnie has a large belly, a bulbous forehead, and a dark coat, closer to burgundy than orange. She weighs 160 pounds and is larger than Iris.

Clipped from: Orangutan's spontaneous whistling opens new chapter in study of evolution of speech

Insights through collaborations with Great Apes

In a paper published this month in Primates, an international journal of primatology that provides a forum on all aspects of primates in relation to humans and other animals, Great Ape Trust scientist Dr. Serge Wich and his colleagues provide the first-ever documentation of a primate mimicking a sound from another species without being specifically trained to do so. Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., began whistling – a sound that is in a human’s, but not an orangutan’s, repertoire – after hearing an animal caretaker make the sound.

“This is important because it provides a mechanism to explain documented between-population variation in sounds for wild orangutans,” Wich said. “In addition, it counters a long-held assumption that non-human primates have fairly fixed sound repertoires that are not under voluntary control. Being able to learn new sounds and use these voluntarily are also two important aspects of human speech and these findings open up new avenues to study certain aspects of human speech evolution in our closest relatives.”

Clipped from: YouTube - Bonnie, a 30-year old whistling orangutan