Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Munster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of three months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.

Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did—by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away. “The only time I was ever mobbed by langurs was when I tried to inspect a baby corpse,” said primatologist

Sarah Hrdy.

Yes, we’re a lot like other primates, particularly the great apes, with whom we have more than 98 per cent of our genes in common. Yet elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief like Gana’s may reveal less about our shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist. Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and the coming Mothers and Others, said, “We’re talking about primates who have singleton births after long periods of gestation. Each baby represents an enormous investment for the mother.”

Michael Wilson, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota who has studied chimpanzees at Jane Goodall’s research site in Gombe, Tanzania, said chimps were “very different from us in terms of what they understand about death and the difference between the living and the dead.” A mother will try to nurse her dead baby back to life, Wilson said, “but when the infant becomes quite decayed, she’ll carry it by just one leg or sling it over her back in a casual way.” Juvenile chimpanzees display signs of genuine grief when their mothers die. Yet adult chimpanzees rarely react with overt sentimentality to the death of another adult, Wilson said. As a rule, sick or elderly adults go off into the forest to die alone, he said.

For some animals, the death of a conspecific is a little tinkle of the dinner bell. A lion will approach another lion’s corpse, give it a sniff and a lick, and if the corpse is fresh enough, will start to eat it. For others, such as naked mole rats, a corpse is considered dangerous and must be properly disposed of. Honeybees are such compulsive housekeepers that if a mouse or other large creature, drawn by the warmth or promise of honey, happens to make its way into the hive and die inside, the bees, unable to bodily remove it, will embalm it in resin collected from trees.

But all is not grim for those dead in tooth and claw. Researchers have determined that elephants deserve their longstanding reputation as exceptionally death-savvy beings, their concern for the remains of their fellows approaching what we might call reverence. Reporting in the journal Biology Letters, Karen McComb of the University of Sussex and her colleagues found that when African elephants were presented with an array of bones and other natural objects, the elephants spent considerably more time exploring the skulls and tusks of elephants than they did anything else, including the skulls of rhinoceroses and other large mammals.

Dr. George Wittemyer of Colorado State University and his colleagues described in Applied Animal Behavior Science the extraordinary reactions of different elephants to the death of one of their prominent matriarchs. “One female stood over the body, rocking back and forth,” Wittemyer said in an interview. “Others raised their foot over her head. Others touched their tusks to hers. They would do their behaviours, and then leave.”
NATALIE ANGIER, NYT