Mountain gorillas have been spotted singing during their supper, as a camera could catch the behavior that has never before been documented on video.
The unprecedented footage of the primate crooners was captured with a little help from a very special camera: a robotic "spy" which was designed to look like a young gorilla.
Live Science reported that the singing apes made their television debut on April 29 in the returning PBS series, "Nature: Spy in the Wild 2." Like its predecessor, which first aired in 2017, the program documents remarkable up-close glimpses of elusive wildlife behavior, seen through the "eyes" of robots that are uncanny lookalikes of the creatures that they film.
Typical filmmakers and camera operators keep a safe distance from wild gorillas, while this time, however, the lifelike animatronic gorilla spy was able to infiltrate a troop and capture their daily routines, which included an impromptu suppertime serenade.
Footage of the singing gorillas was featured in the first episode of "Spy in the Wild 2" and showed "the apes reclining amid dense foliage in a sanctuary in Uganda" according to Live Science.
"As they munched on leaves and stems, they hummed to themselves in contentment, accompanying their vegetarian meal with a vocal chorus of appreciation," according to the episode's narrator.
"And the gorillas produced a chorus of mealtime music in more ways than one. Under the spy robot's watchful camera eye, the great apes also revealed that they were extremely gassy, punctuating their dinner with near-constant bursts of flatulence."
Watch it here:
https://youtu.be/6yB51vdkZAE
In 2016, scientists confirmed that gorillas sing to themselves while eating. They have recorded audio of behavior that had long been anecdotal. The researchers observed those western lowland gorillas in a protected forest in the Republic of Congo and published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.
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