The Book of Animal Ignorance by Ted Dewan Page B

concerns Adwaitya’s descendants. In 1875, the government of Mauritius, inspired by Albert Gunter of the British Museum, declared Geochelone gigantes the world’s first protected species. There are now 152,000 Aldabras – 90 per cent of the world’s total giant tortoise population – happily isolated from their only serious threat: us.

Gibbon
    The talking ape
    O ne of the odd things about the great apes – our closest primate relatives like the chimpanzee and the gorilla – is that their vocal communication is relatively unsophisticated compared to our own.
    Not so the thirteen species of gibbons that live in the tropical forests of South-East Asia. Gibbons aren’t monkeys – they don’t have tails or cheek pouches – but ‘lesser apes’, and their calls are some of the most beautiful and idiosyncratic sounds made by any animal. Gibbons use these calls to communicate precise messages, assembling elements of each call into a string which has a meaning that is understood by other gibbons in their family group, who use a similar sequence in return. Linguists call this ‘syntax’ – the linking of sounds in a particular way to create meaning – and it is the basis of all language.
    KING OF THE SWINGERS
    The development of this language may be linked to the fact that gibbons – unlike most other monkeys and apes – are monogamous. Like songbirds, gibbons sing to attract and keep a mate and to mark their territory, particularly their favourite fruit trees. To snag the best female to breed with, a male gibbon has to work on his singing. For females, the better the singer, the better the genes, and the more regular the supply of fruit.
    Couples sing to each other every morning in fabulously complex duets. Males sing before dawn, sometimeswhile still in ‘bed’, which for a gibbon means sitting high up in the branches, with their arms hugging their knees and their heads tucked into their laps. Females are much more active and dramatic, breaking branches, leaping and climaxing with a sequence called the ‘great call’. Males who have a mate sing more regularly when there are rogue males sniffing around, as you’d expect.
    Most family groups comprise a male and female living with three or four offspring, some of whom don’t leave home until they are ten years old. Because of their energy-poor diet – fruit, leaves, and the occasional insect – families spend half their time just hanging around grooming one another. The female rules the roost at home; the males are right at the bottom of the hierarchy, even below the offspring. In some species the male takes over childcare once the young are weaned, teaching them how to swing.
    No one knows how the gibbon got its name. The French naturalist Buffon coined it, maybe as a version of ‘gibb’, the old name for cat, or in honour of his friend Edward Gibbon, the historian .
    Gibbons are built to swing. Their arms are longer than their legs and bodies combined, and strong enough to propel them at speeds of 35 mph and across 50-foot gaps between trees. Their wrist bones are separated by soft pads which allow movement in all directions. This enables them to swing and change direction without having to turn their bodies – saving energy and giving them the breathtaking agility for which they’re best known. On the rare occasions they walk on the ground, gibbons are bipedal, which has led researchers to propose that walking on two feet might originally have developed as an unforeseen by-product of arm-swinging in the canopy.
    In Thai mythology, gibbons are the reincarnated souls of lost lovers. In one story, a woman searching for her murdered husband wanders the forests to this day repeating the gibbon’s plaintive song, ‘ Pau! Pau! ’ (Thai for ‘husband’).

Giraffe
    Big head, bad smell
    T he ability to reach the leaves at the very top of trees seems