A trio of researchers, one a zoologist, another a primatologist and the third a linguistics professor, from Institut Jean Nicod, Heinrich Heine University and the University of Oslo, respectively, have discovered that female gibbons engage in a strange type of robotic dancing.

In their paper posted on the bioRxiv preprint server, Camille Coye, Kai Caspar and Pritty Patel-Grosz describe the dancing they observed and theorize possible reasons for the behavior.

Many types of animals, from birds, to spiders and insects, have been observed engaging in what looks like dancing. And one thing most of them have in common is that the dancing is done by males, generally as a means of attracting a mate. In this new study, the research team has found that adult female gibbons sometimes dance for no other reason than to get attention.