Treating wounds with bugs: the unusual habits of Gabon chimps

How to deal with a wound?

For people, the primary intuition can be to disinfect it after which cowl it with a bandage.

But chimpanzees have invented a extra inventive methodology: catching bugs and making use of them on to the open wound.

Scientists noticed this conduct in chimpanzees within the West African nation of Gabon, noticing that the apes not solely use bugs to deal with their very own wounds, but additionally these of their friends.

The analysis, revealed Monday within the journal Current Biology, marks an essential contribution to ongoing scientific debate concerning the capability of chimpanzees—and of animals generally—to selflessly assist others.

“When you’re going to school and you read in your biology books about the amazing things that animals can do,” Simone Pika, a biologist on the University of Osnabruck in Germany and a co-author of the examine, advised AFP. “I think it could really be something like that that will end up in those books.”

The undertaking started in 2019, when an grownup feminine chimpanzee named Suzee was noticed inspecting a wound on the foot of her adolescent son.

Suzee then out of the blue caught an insect out of the air, put it in her mouth, apparently squeezed it, after which utilized it to her son’s wound.

After extracting the insect from the wound, she utilized it two extra instances.

The scene unfolded in Loango National Park on Gabon’s Atlantic coast, the place researchers are finding out a bunch of 45 central chimpanzees, an endangered species.

Over the next 15 months, scientists noticed chimpanzees administer the identical therapy on themselves at the very least 19 instances.

And on two different events they noticed injured chimpanzees being handled in the identical manner by one or a number of fellow apes.

The wounds, generally a number of centimeters broad, can come from conflicts between members of similar or an opposing group.

Far from protesting the therapy, the bruised chimpanzees had been blissful to be tended to.

“It takes lot of belief to place an insect in an open wound,” mentioned Pika. “They seem to understand that if you do this to me with this insect, then my wound gets better. It’s amazing.”

Soothing properties?

Researchers haven’t been capable of determine what bug was used on the injuries, however they consider it to be a flying insect given the chimpanzees’ speedy motion to catch it.

Pika says the insect might include anti-inflammatory substances which have a soothing impact.

Insects are identified to have varied medical properties and researches might want to conduct extra work to detect and examine the insect in query.

Birds, bears, elephants and different animals have already been noticed self-medicating, for instance by consuming crops.

But what is exclusive about chimpanzees is that they are going to deal with not simply themselves, but additionally assist others.

Some scientists, nevertheless, nonetheless doubt the power of animal species to exhibit prosocial behaviors, resembling selflessly caring for others, Pika mentioned.

But right here the chimpanzees don’t have anything to achieve, she pressured. So why do they do it?

In people, prosocial conduct is usually linked to empathy.

Could the identical feeling be at play in chimpanzees, Pika questioned.

“It is a hypothesis that we must study,” she mentioned.

© 2022 AFP