How old is koko the gorilla 2017

May and June saw a large number of humpback whales enter the bay. It was a close call for another humpback whale in the San Francisco Bay. Video taken from the Golden Gate Bridge by Lauri Duke showed a whale rolling out of the way as a sailboat approached. A real-life angry bird wouldn't stop attacking pedestrians passing by the Safeway in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood. A man in Palmdale Los Angeles County discovered a snake in his bathtub after reportedly mistaking it for a rag and grabbing it.

Solano County Deputy Coroner Amy Thurau examines dead humans for a living, but can't seem to handle dead snakes. In a video posted to Facebook by the Solano County Sheriff's office, Thurau is seen struggling to pick up and remove a dead snake from the road. How would you react if you saw the fin of a great white shark pop up in the ocean next to you? Firefighters rescued a small canine from a burning house in Bakersfield, and thanks to their efforts, the pup survived.

A man kayaking off the Santa Barbara coast was attacked by a shark and luckily got away unharmed. Police in Riverside County arrested a year-old man on suspicion of bank robbery and found more than they had hoped for while searching his home. Police found and removed 35 dogs including seven small puppies from the man's house while searching the premises for evidence related to a bank robbery.

California Highway Patrol received an unusual roadkill sighting: A concerned citizen reported a smushed kangaroo on I in Oakland.

Juvenile bobcats seldom leave their dens or mothers, which makes a hiker's discovery of a kitten alone on a trail in Marin County all the more startling. It enters by the nostrils, wiggles upwards through olfactory pathways and plants itself in the brain.

Once invaded, victims can't be treated and will most certainly die. The parasite, called Miamiensis avidus, is the pathogen most likely responsible for 's mass die-offs of several Bay Area fish species. The body of a juvenile white shark washed ashore in Monterey Bay. Hours later, vandals hacked off its dorsal fin and removed most of its teeth. A family in Ridgecrest Kern County got quite the scare when they discovered a family of venomous snakes living inside their children's plastic playhouse in their backyard.

Animal Control Officer Shawna Villa-Rodriguez responded to the call and found not one, but 19 sidewinder rattlesnakes under the playhouse. A woman in Stockton claimed that her children stumbled upon a decomposing mouse inside a play structure at a Chuck E. Tree trimming was likely to blame.

A litter of kittens left for dead on a boat in San Rafael — two of them secured in a cooler bag that had been zipped shut — were rescued in San Rafael Yacht Harbor. There have been a series of attacks in the critical wildlife sanctuary.

The deadly virus has not only killed many humans but has also decimated gorilla and chimpanzee populations. Visit the new DW website Take a look at the beta version of dw. Go to the new dw. More info OK. Wrong language? Change it here DW. COM has chosen English as your language setting.

COM in 30 languages. Deutsche Welle. Audiotrainer Deutschtrainer Die Bienenretter. News Koko, the gorilla who mastered sign language, dies aged 46 The western lowland gorilla appeared in many documentaries showing her mastery of 1, words of sign language. Icon for interspecies understanding "Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for interspecies communication and empathy," the foundation said in a statement on its website.

Welcoming Rwanda's gorilla babies. The dancing gorilla. Gorilla population in Africa rises The population of mountain gorillas, which survive on the forest-cloaked volcanoes of central Africa, has increased by a quarter to over 1, individuals since , wildlife authorities said. Kidnapping in Congo gorilla sanctuary Two British tourists have been kidnapped and a park ranger has been killed in an ambush at a popular national park.

Ebola wipes out humanity's closest relatives The deadly virus has not only killed many humans but has also decimated gorilla and chimpanzee populations. The fight against poachers. Date Western lowland gorillas Gorilla gorilla gorilla represent one of two subspecies of western gorillas Gorilla gorilla , and though they are a protected species, they are still vulnerable to poaching and habitat destruction from human activity, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reported.

In fact, conservation scientists warn that if current threats to western lowland gorillas continue unchecked, half their populations could vanish by Koko herself had some very choice words to share about humans and their impact on the planet, which were incorporated into a song about climate change titled "Man Stupid," created in collaboration with the Laurel Canyon Animal Company and posted to YouTube in January Koko was born at the San Francisco Zoo on July 4, , and when she was only 1 year old, she was introduced to Francine "Penny" Patterson, now the president and director of research at TGF.

Patterson, who was then a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at Stanford University in California, began teaching the young primate a modified form of American Sign Language , initiating what would become the longest interspecies communication study in history, according to TGF. In short, humans are the only species who use "language", according to Chomsky. A test-case begun in the early 's, Koko the Gorilla and her care-giver Penny, are challenging this human-centric nativist view.

While certainly Koko the Gorilla probably doesn't have the capacity to read Greek and write analyses about James Joyce's "Ulysses", based on the video presentations, Koko clearly has internal thoughts and feelings, and she can express those thoughts in a form of sign-language adapted from the sign-language for the deaf. Of course, this is only an assessment of a layman who doesn't have scientific credentials.

Not all of the scientific community, according to the documentary, is convinced that Koko or any other primates have the capability to express unique thoughts through some sort of language. The present documentary, "Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks to People", makes the case that Koko is not just imitating her care-givers' gestures to get goodies. She's using sign-language to express complex inner thoughts and emotions. While I do believe it's a mistake to think that gorillas think and see the world in the same way as human beings, the point is that she is constructing her thoughts into recognizable patterns through her sign-language.

If this is not language, maybe I don't understand the term. Scientists on the skeptics side have claimed Koko really isn't engaging in language because Koko's signing lacks the grammatical complexity of say a Western language like English, French, German or Italian. In English, we make the distinction between "boy eats sandwich" and "sandwich eats boy". While such subtlety of word-order may not be the case with Koko, generally speaking, she does appear to be expressing unique thoughts, not just engaging in "monkey see, monkey do".

So my question is: does a language have to be grammatically intricate to be a language? The documentary chronicles the history and goals of her care-givers, particularly Penny Patterson who is really a mother figure in Koko's life, and how they want to better understand the inner thought processes of non-human primates.

As shocking as it seems to us now, as recently as the 's, it was believed that animals didn't really have thoughts and emotions, and they were just organisms which respond to stimuli. The ground-breaking work of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey was still on the edge of scientific recognition, showing how non-human primates exhibited much behavior strikingly similar to humans.

At the very least, Goodall and Fossey proved that apes and chimps definitely have thoughts and emotions. Penny Patterson decided to take the idea one step further and see if we could understand better the inner reality of a primate by not only raising her from birth with humans but teaching her sign language to communicate. And she was of course Koko the Gorilla. Much of the documentary shows Koko spewing out sign-language words in no particular order but they clearly are unique messages of her thought processes.

Koko at one point asked for a pet, and her care-givers gave her a stuffed animal, but Koko clearly didn't want a stuffed toy, and kept signing "sad". She wanted a real animal. She was shown a litter of kittens not long afterwards and selected a gray kitten who she named "All Ball" because the kitten was like a little ball of fur, I suspect. Koko and All Ball became best buddies.