Most of us remember playing games of ‘It’ or ‘Tag’ when we were children (or indeed a bit older!) and now researchers at Portsmouth University have spotted gorillas playing the same game.
They will hit their playmate and then run away – with others sometimes joining in and the roles reversing, just like our familiar game. Although we can’t be sure that they are playing tag in the way that we may understand it, there are certainly strong similarities.
Marina Davila Ross, one of the researchers who studied the gorillas, believes that playing tag gives the gorillas a chance to work out how best to relate to others in social situations. For example, if they just tapped another gorilla they might not run away at all; but if they hit a bit harder they would run away. This suggests that the gorillas were learning where the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were – an important skill when you have to get along with each other!
So just as with human children, it may be that games like this teach gorillas important social lessons for their adult life. Not to mention having fun.
Source:
Van Leeuwen, E., Zimmermann, E. and Davila Ross, M. (2010) Responding to inequities: gorillas try to maintain their competitive advantage during play fights, Biology Letters.