Chimpanzees Spotted Using Crushed Insects to Treat Each Other’s Wounds
Scientists have observed wild chimpanzees applying crushed insects to the wounds of themselves and others, including a mother chimpanzee treating her son’s injured foot.
Scientists have discovered that chimpanzees self-medicate by applying crushed insects to treat their wounds, in the first findings of their kind.
A group of 22 chimpanzees in the west African nation of Gabon were monitored for over a year by a team of scientists, who were surprised to observe the chimpanzees self-medicating by catching, crushing, and applying insects to their open flesh wounds.
Strikingly, the findings reveal that the chimpanzees use the insects to not only treat their own wounds, but to treat the wounds of their companions as well.
This evidence of chimpanzees selflessly treating the wounds of other chimpanzees, helps add to the debate of empathy in non-human species.
“When you’re going to school and you read in your biology books about the amazing things that animals can do … I think it could really be something like that that will end up in those books”, biologist Simone Pika, a co-author of the study, told AFP.
Pika suggests that the insect may contain anti-inflammatory substances that have a soothing effect, reports The Guardian.
An adult female chimpanzee called Suzee was the first chimpanzee in the study to be observed medicating, when she treated a wound on the foot of her adolescent son.
Scientists had recorded Suzee as she inspected her son’s foot injury. She was then seen quickly catching an insect, placing it between her lips, and then applying it to her son’s flesh wound. Taking the insect back to her lips, Suzee then applied the insect to the wound two more times.
“It takes a lot of trust to put an insect in an open wound,” explains Pika. “They seem to understand that if you do this to me with this insect, then my wound gets better. It’s amazing.”
During the 15-month observational study of over twenty chimpanzees, seven chimpanzees were recorded using insects to apply to their own wounds or to the wounds of their peers.
Self-medication in the wild has been witnessed in multiple animals including elephants, bears, starlings, and moths. However, it is often more limited to animals eating plants with medicinal properties to help control illnesses, rather than directly applying materials to a wound.
Whilst the application of materials, including leaves to wounds, has been reported in more recent studies, this new report, published this month in the journal Current Biology, is the first of its kind to show the application of insects to help heal wounds.
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