The study of food-manipulation techniques may help us to identify subtle behavioral variation that currently remains unidentified with the traditional ethonographic approaches. Preliminary results from frame by frame video analysis of 1 habituated group of wild western gorillas at Bai Hokou, Central African Republic, suggest that food features (e.g. size, shape, extraction requirements) affect individual food-manipulation strategies in gorillas. The preliminary results moreover suggest that wild gorillas show weaker hand preferences than their (non-writing) human counterparts living in the same habitat.
