What do you call a cross between a sneeze and a cough? A “snough,” naturally. Zoo gorillas make the sound when keepers with food come near.
Salmi first encountered the snough years ago at Zoo Atlanta, when she and a zookeeper noticed the gorillas making a strange sound. “We actually laughed,” she recalls. Gorillas utter an assortment of calls, but the snough stood out. As the animals wheeze out the noise, they open their mouths wide, almost as if they’re preparing to yodel. “It’s very theatrical,” Salmi says. And it seemed to crop up only in a specific situation — when keepers showed up with food.
In an enclosure at Zoo Atlanta, Sukari the gorilla makes a call that sounds something like a sneeze and a cough — a “snough.” Sukari and other zoo gorillas used the sound most often when zookeepers with food were near. And the snoughing wasn’t limited to Zoo Atlanta gorillas. Surveys from 19 zoos across the United States and Canada revealed that other gorillas make the same snuffling sound. Those animals probably didn’t learn to snough from the Zoo Atlanta gorillas, because they’ve never been exposed to one another, Salmi says.
If the gorillas want something they can’t physically reach, they may be “trying to use communicative signals to manipulate humans” into helping, says Jared Taglialatela, an evolutionary biologist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia who was not involved with the study.