Chimp affairs

[Scientists from the University of St Andrews have shown that chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest have their own signature style when drumming on trees. / Rainforest trees are supported by huge roots that form a large flat buttress. Chimpanzees take advantage of these roots to drum with their hands and feet, sending messages that carry over a kilometre through the dense humid forests]

I was prompted by a short piece somewhere in Nature to take a look at the paper at reference 1 - from mainland Europe rather than from Scotland - and I now know that, chimpanzees, particularly male chimpanzees, go in for long range communication with short bursts of drumming - with hands or feet - on the buttress roots of the trees of their forests. To the same end, they also throw stones at trees, with favoured trees accumulating big piles of stones.

The rhythm of some of this drumming serves to identify the individual and is a way to signal the presence of that individual, perhaps over a range of as much as a kilometre or so. Drumming may also be a form of display and it is certainly associated with various vocalisations and various other behaviours. There may be some cultural transmission here.

So far so good, but one soon gets into a thicket of statistics and one can only feel sorry for all those primatologists who joined up because they liked working with and around primates, with and around chimps, not because they liked getting stuck into the intricacies of statistics and statistical packages on their computers.

Then, one is frequently referred to supplementary information, only to find oneself getting nowhere when one clicks on what one thought was the relevant button. Perhaps you have to pay, but the system does not bother to tell you about that.

As an alternative, I thought to ask Bing and Google for videos about chimpanzees drumming, of which there were lots. But apart from the irritating advertisements - perhaps I do need to pay to get rid of them - not much information. Plenty of talking heads, not much in the way of drumming chimps.

Which has exhausted my interest in this topic.

PS: I don't think de Waal talked about either drumming or throwing stones in the talk which prompted reference 2. And I don't suppose that the chimpanzees which feature on the popular television series 'Monkey Life' do it at all. Something else to consult BH about.

References

Reference 1a: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0053.

Reference 1b: Stone-assisted drumming in Western chimpanzees and its implications for communication and cultural transmission - Sem van Loon, Ignas M. A. Heitkönig, Annemarie Goedmakers, Roger Mundry, Marc Naguib - 2025.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-monkey-life.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Life.