Dan can probably ID the species here, but some guests got a treat this afternoon as mom was swinging around right before dinner time I believe. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
Were these the ones in front of Kali River Rapids? I must admit, this one looks very chimp-like...but the ones in that lagoon in front of Kali are gibbons, I believe. The hair down in the face makes it harder to tell, but I do think that's a gibbon. Here are some shots I took of the gibbons by Kali: The nose looks the same, as does the chest area. The darker ones I shot had white on their cheeks and yours does not...but the general face and build looks the same.
I'd say I'm touched that you thought of me for the ID.. but I know I've been a know-it-all with regards to species. The problem is my areas of knowledge are rather specialized, I can tell a chameleon from any other lizard in the blink of an eye, but primates are a different matter. Justin's shots look like gibbons.. My local zoo recently had a gibbon birth and sent out an email with info about the species, the different color phases are probably gender differences (although they're born the same color regardless of gender). I was about to say that I wasn't familiar enough to know about the white cheeks on the black individual.. but I looked it up on the web page, and it says they're called "white cheeked gibbons". So there's my answer there.. As to Roger's individual, that required some net sleuthing. I love this stuff, I once tracked down someone who had accidentally connected to my house network and found out her name, what college she went to, what sport she played... no, it's not as creepy as it may sound, I just found her name because her copy of Itunes had sort of linked to mine, I had no idea it did that until I saw it in action, and after listening to her music for a while I picked her name off of it and did a web search and ended up with all the info. I think she was home from college and didn't realize her laptop had connected to my network instead of her own. I didn't do anything with it, except secure the network so she couldn't get back on (although I missed listening to her music), but it was a fun bit of investigating. But for the monkey, I hit wikipedia and dug up a phylogenic tree for primates, and checked out the species that were closely related to gibbons. After a few ambiguous species I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamang Scroll down a bit, to the "media" section, which is just below the "threats to population". Notice the video, described "Video of the Hylobates syndactylus at Disney's Animal Kingdom". That's still not conclusive, but so far we have two different but similar primate species, I don't know if AK would have any more. I think it's a siamang. You can find other pictures of them on wikipedia (or more specifically, wikimedia commons, which can be an excellent site for animal photography, there's some really good stuff there if you look for it) described as being taken at AK, which look like they're in exactly the same enclosure with the same roped together bamboo poles. I have little experience with siamangs, but I know I always enjoy watching gibbons do their thing at the zoo. Their mode of movement, that swinging style, is SO dramatic. The zoo has them in a fake forest area with a lot of fake tree branches in a seemingly random pattern, but they can use those branches to move so fluidly and to get anywhere they want. It's this physics in motion thing, the swinging action looks to be very efficient in terms of energy use, they just redirect their motion. And they make it look so easy. Which for them I suppose it is. Thanks for the excuse for a cyberhunt. I still marvel at how much information is available in this information age of ours, yet how rarely most use it, me included.
Good one Dan. That sounds like you got it. I had been too lazy last night to do any web searching, but knew I had shots of Animal Kingdom primates that looked similar, and I knew them to be gibbons. But there were a few features that did not match that were bothering me. The noses and general body build looked similar, but the eyes, the hair on the head and cheeks, and the hair over the feet didn't seem right. I have never heard of a siamang before...so thanks for expanding everyone's knowledge base a bit! I wonder if they are closely-enough related to gibbons that they can share the same enclosure, or if the siamangs are kept in a different area without access. Either way, next time I'll have to keep my eye and my lens out for a siamang.
Here's another shot taken of the two of them at the same time: <img src="http://www.themeparkphotos.us/cpg140/albums/uploads/022708/226e4672_10.jpg" /> This time I used A2 instead of Bibble; I could have bumped the saturation up but I've been using vibrance more than sat with A2. I think the colors look more natural that way.
