Chimps Use Insects to Soothe Each Other's Wounds in Never-Before-Seen Behavior
In 2019, Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer and budding evolutionary biologist for The Loango Chimpanzee Project, noticed something no other primatologist in Africa had reported before.
In the forests of Gabon, while following and filming a female chimpanzee Suzee and her son Sia, Mascaro noticed Suzee clamp something tiny between her lips, before applying the invisible matter to a wound on Sia's foot.
Looking back at her footage, Mascaro realized Suzee had snatched the topical treatment straight from the underside of a leaf. It looked like a tiny, dark insect.
"Discussing these observations and the possible function of the behavior with the team members, we realized that we had never seen such a behavior and that it had also never been documented before," says Mascaro.
Once aware of the practice, Mascaro and her colleagues began to notice it regularly. ...
Over the next 15 months, researchers for the chimpanzee project carefully documented 20 other similar events on the west coast of Africa. Most of the time, the chimpanzees in Gabon applied the unidentified insects to their own wounds, but there were several occasions in which they also helped each other out. ...
Self-medication is quite common in the animal kingdom, seen in birds, bees, lizards, elephants, and chimpanzees, but selfless behaviors with regards to medicine are exceedingly rare.
While chimpanzees and bonobos have been observed swallowing the leaves of medicinal plants to help ward off intestinal infections, the topical application of insects as medicine is a new discovery.
"Our observations provide the first evidence that chimpanzees regularly capture insects and apply them onto open wounds," says primatologist Tobias Deschner from the University of Massachusetts. ...
