An orangutan has successfully treated a wound with medicine from a tropical plant - the latest example of how some animals attempt to soothe their own ills with remedies found in the wild.
Scientists observed a wild orangutan in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park - pluck and chew up leaves of a medicinal plant used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation. Remarkably, Rakus (as the animal has been named), an adult male orangutan, then used his fingers to apply the plant juices to an injury on the right cheek. Afterward, he pressed the chewed plant to cover the open wound like a makeshift bandage, according to a new study in Scientific Reports.
Previous research has documented several species of great apes foraging for medicines in forests to heal themselves, but scientists hadn’t yet seen an animal treat itself in this way.
“This is the first time that we have observed a wild animal applying a quite potent medicinal plant directly to a wound,” said co-author Isabelle Laumer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany.
“If this behaviour exists in some of our closest living relatives, what could that tell us about how medicine first evolved?” said Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientific officer of the nonprofit Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
