Wild chimpanzees are filmed using “First aid from the forest”

Records are a continuity of the study that discovered that chimpanzees use and eat some plants to treat lesions.

The chimpanzees in Uganda, Africa were observed using medicinal plants in various ways to treat open wounds and other injuries.

In a research that continues the discovery made last year – that the chimpanzees are looking for and consume car plants – measuring – scientists have accompanied and observed animals to understand how they deal with injuries.

The researchers of Oxford University, together with a Team of the Biongo Forest Reserve, recorded and filmed the chimpanzees using plants such as the emergency room, both in them and among them.

The study, which also analyzed decades of recordings made by other scientists, led to a catalog of the different ways in which chimpanzees use the “forest emergency room”.

According to the researchers, the study, published by the newspapers of Ecology and Evolution (Borders in Ecology and Evolution, in the free translation in Portuguese), adds to an increasing number of tests that records, including chimpanzees, Orangutings and Gorillas, use natural remedies in various ways to stay in health in nature.

Elodie Freymann, a researcher of the study leader, explained that there is “an entire behavioral repertoire that chimpanzees use when they are sick or injured in the jungle – to treat and maintain hygiene”.

“Some of these behaviors include the use of plants that can be found here. Chimpanzees apply these plants directly to lesions or chew them, then they use this chewed material on an open wound.”

The researchers analyzed the images of a very young female chimpanzezé, chewing the plant and therefore applying it to a bruise to your mother’s body.

They also found record of chimpanzees who took care of the wounds of other animals with whom they were relatives. This is particularly exciting, according to Freymann, “because it strengthens the evidence that wild chimpanzees have empathy”.

Record diary of the 90s

Some of the hundreds of written observations that Freymann and his colleagues analyzed from a diary on the field from the Biongo search station. The tests have existed since the 90s and is a book in which employees, researchers and local visitors describe any interesting behavior they saw while looking at chimpanzees.

There are stories in the book of leaves applied to lesions and chimpanzees that help others remove traps that have been trapped in the body.

There are also some records of hygiene habits surprisingly similar to that of humans: a book annotation describes a chimpanzee that uses the leaves to clean after the poop.

The group of researchers had previously identified some plants that the chimpanzees were looking for and ate when they were injured. These scientists took samples of these plants, tested them in the laboratory and found that most had antibacterial properties.

Chimpanzees are not the only non -human primates with apparent knowledge of medicinal plants. A recent study showed a wild orangutan using chewed leaves to treat a face injury.

Scientists believe that studying the behavior of these wild primates and a better understanding of the plants that chimpanzees use when they are sick or injured, can help in the search for new drugs.

For the news of the BBC, Freymann said that the more we learn the behavior of the chimpanzees and their intelligence, “the more we realize how much small human beings really know nature”.

“If I had put here in this forest, without food and medicine, I doubt that I would be able to survive for a long time, especially if I had wounded or sick.”

“But chimpanzees thrive here because they know how to access the secrets of this place and find everything they need to survive around them.”

Source: Terra

Rose

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