When treating a wound, humans first disinfect it and then cover it with a bandage, but chimpanzees have invented a more creative method: catching insects and applying them directly to the open wound.
Scientists observed this behavior in chimpanzees in the West African nation of Gabon, noticing that the apes not only use insects to treat their own wounds, but also those of their peers.
The study, published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, marks an important contribution to ongoing scientific debate about the ability of chimpanzees — and of animals in general — to selflessly help others.
Photo: AFP/Tobias Deschner
“When you’re going to school and you read in your biology books about the amazing things that animals can do,” said Simone Pika, a biologist at the University of Osnabruck in Germany and a coauthor of the study. “I think it could really be something like that that will end up in those books.”
The project began in 2019 when a female chimpanzee named Suzee was observed inspecting a wound on the foot of her adolescent son.
Suzee then suddenly caught an insect out of the air, put it in her mouth, apparently squeezed it, and then applied it to her son’s wound.
After extracting the insect from the wound, she applied it again.
The scene unfolded in Loango National Park on Gabon’s Atlantic coast, where researchers are studying a group of 45 central chimpanzees, an endangered species.
Over the following 15 months, scientists saw chimpanzees administer the same treatment on themselves at least 19 times.
On two other occasions, they observed injured chimpanzees being treated in the same way by one or several fellow apes.
The wounds, sometimes several centimeters wide, can come from conflicts between members of the same or an opposing group.
Far from protesting the treatment, the bruised chimpanzees were happy to be tended to.
“It takes lot of trust to put an insect in an open wound,” Pika said. “They seem to understand that if you do this to me with this insect, then my wound gets better. It’s amazing.”
Researchers have not been able to identify what bug was used on the wounds, but they believe it to be a flying insect given the chimpanzees’ rapid movement to catch it.
The insect could contain anti-inflammatory substances that have a soothing effect, Pika said.
Insects are known to have various medical properties, and researchers would need to conduct more work to detect and study the insect in question.
Birds, bears, elephants and other animals have been observed self-medicating, for example by eating plants. What is unique about chimpanzees is that they treat not just themselves, but also help others.
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