Watch: Chimpanzees give each other first aid
Credit: Science News/Catherine Hobatier
Chimpanzees use forest first aid to treat wounds and leaves to wipe their bottoms, scientists have found.
A study, led by a University of Oxford researcher, catalogued the apes dabbing leaves on their wounds, or applying sap and chewed up plant matter to the injuries.
They treated the wounds of other members of their group as well as their own.
The research, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, adds to a growing body of evidence on how apes take care of themselves in the wild.
Dr Elodie Freymann, of Oxford University's School of Anthropology, said: 'We humans like to fancy ourselves unique in lots of different ways. And I think for a long time, we thought that healthcare was one of those ways in which we humans are special.'
She said there was 'a whole behavioural repertoire that chimpanzees use when they're sick or injured in the wild – to treat themselves and to maintain hygiene'.
Dr Freymann added: 'Some of these include the use of plants that can be found here. The chimpanzees dab them on their wounds or chew the plants up, and then apply the chewed material to the open injury.'
Footage of the apes treating each other was included in the study, conducted in Uganda's Budongo Forest, as well as years of observations noted by field staff, researchers and visitors.
A log book dating back to the 1990s was found to include anecdotal accounts of the apes dabbing wounds, removing snares and cleaning themselves with leaves after defecating, or mating.
Credit: Dr. Elodie Freymann
Dr Freymann previously reported that chimpanzees appeared to seek out specific medicinal plants to treat their ailments.
A 2024 paper saw researchers test the plants eaten by sick or wounded chimps and found that they often had antibacterial or anti-inflammatory properties.
Meanwhile, an orangutan was recorded applying the leaves of a plant commonly used in traditional medicine to a cut on its face, seemingly to hasten healing.
Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos have also been recorded swallowing whole leaves from Aspilia plants to get rid of worms.
In 2022, a community of chimpanzees in Gabon was seen putting insects onto their open wounds, potentially as a form of first aid.
Chimpanzees in captivity have long been observed giving each other basic medical care, including removing splinters and cleaning each other's teeth.
Finding the same tendency in the wild means 'additional evidence for empathic capacities in our closest evolutionary relatives', researchers concluded.
They said it was still not clear how the behaviour was learnt or transmitted and 'establishing this will be an important step for understanding whether any components of non-human healthcare systems are influenced by local medicinal cultures'.
Studying ape healthcare could even lead to the discovery of medicines, scientists believe.
Dr Freymann told the BBC: 'The more we learn about chimpanzee behaviour and intelligence, the more I think we come to understand how little we as humans actually know about the natural world.
'If I were plopped down here in this forest with no food and no medicine, I doubt that I'd be able to survive very long, especially if I were injured or sick.
'But chimpanzees thrive here because they know how to access the secrets of this place, and how to find all they need to survive from their surroundings.'
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Boston Globe
13 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Their children have a rare condition. They didn't know its name – until now.
The adults standing by waited to see what the two would do next. To someone watching from the outside, the interactions of five children in a D.C. park on a warm weekend afternoon would not have seemed extraordinary. But to those children's parents, every move offered insights - into what they could do now, into what they might be able to do someday. Advertisement The families recently learned they share a profound connection. They had each watched their children fail to hit the milestones others did with seeming ease. They were late to crawl and walk. Some have trouble eating and don't speak. A few have seizures. 'Global developmental delays,' the doctors call it when such lags in language, motor skills and cognition happen at the same time. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Doctors couldn't tell them why their children were experiencing what they were experiencing, and with no diagnosis, they had no clear prognosis for their kids, or themselves. It was an excruciating mystery that hummed through years of specialist visits and brain scans that yielded no clear answers. Until last year. Thanks to a global partnership among genetics researchers and the relentless organizing of parents, the five D.C.-area families who gathered in the park - and many more who aren't yet aware of the breakthrough - now have a name for their children's condition. The rare genetic anomaly that causes it was discovered just last year, and families that once felt alone with their questions are now finding answers and one another. Advertisement Eleanor clapped when she saw the flower that day. But instead of taking hold of it, she let more than a minute pass, seeming unable to grasp it. Three-year-old Rae lay beside the two, warming herself in the sun. Her mom, Leila Levi, marveled at seeing the children together. 'You just hope,' she said, 'that the world is kind to them.' Eleanor Liu, 3, played in a D.C. park in April. Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post The discovery A little over a year before, a leading expert on rare diseases at the University of Oxford, Nicky Whiffin, was looking at the data in front of her and thought there was a mistake. One of her students, Yuyang Chen, had been searching through a vast British database, known as the 100,000 Genomes Project, as part of her team's effort to ferret out answers for people with undiagnosed conditions. For years, Whiffin's strategy had been to scour the less-studied regions of the genome. Out of nearly 9,000 patients with unexplained brain development disorders, Chen found that 46 of them had an identical change in their DNA, a single added letter in their 6-billion-part genetic code. 'That looks to me like it's an error in the data,' Whiffin told him. In the world of rare conditions, that was a stunningly high number of cases. Something must be wrong with the sequencing technology or their analysis tools, she thought. So they set about trying to knock down their discovery. Advertisement 'And we just couldn't disprove it,' Whiffin said. She reached out to collaborators around the world looking for confirmation, including a scientist in Boston who is part of the GREGoR Consortium, a national network of researchers working to diagnose rare disease cases. That scientist, Anne O'Donnell-Luria, sent a request to a geneticist at Children's National Hospital in D.C. for more information about patients with the same genetic change, or similar ones in nearly the same place. Seth Berger, a medical geneticist at Children's National, looked at about 300 patients. A big part of his job is helping to discover new diseases. He had never seen anything like this. 'Typically when we find a new syndrome, I'll find one in this region. And then we'll find one in like Texas, and one in Florida, and maybe a couple in Europe somewhere. And you maybe find five people around the world,' Berger said. A genetic condition known as ReNU syndrome was discovered last year, bringing answers to five D.C.-area families. Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post Four families were found in the Washington area alone. Whiffin published an early version of the findings in April 2024, and a final version in the journal Nature that July. The math was astounding - the implications for families even more so. She estimates that 0.4 percent of babies born with severe neurodevelopmental disorders have this newly identified genetic condition. 'Huge,' Berger said of the discovery. 'Kind of madness,' Whiffin said. It's called ReNU syndrome, a nod to the gene at issue, RNU4-2. By Whiffin's calculations, 100,000 people around the globe are living with it. 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Shedrick Pelt/For The Washington Post For eight years, Lindsay Pearse and her husband, Grant, who live in Warrenton, Virginia, tried to figure out what was happening with their son, Lars. They were in and out of the hospital, seeing specialist after specialist. They addressed Lars's 'global delays' with physical and speech therapy, a feeding tube and leg braces. But they, like the others, had not been able to dig out the cause of their child's challenges. They thought they might never know. Advertisement Then they got a call early last year. Lars - like Adeline, Eleanor and Rae - had been enrolled in a research project with Berger at Children's National. Their DNA had provided vital pieces of evidence in Whiffin's global study. For families, it's been like they've somehow been given access to a time machine. Beyond the kinship and camaraderie of finding families who have gone through what they have, they now have a view into the opportunities and dangers coming years or decades down the line. Lars had his first seizure when he was 2. They were sporadic at first, but in the last year they've ramped up, which had worried his parents. Now, the family is part of a community that includes parents of teenagers and young adults with ReNU syndrome who saw the same pattern in their kids and shared their experiences. From them, the family also learned that weak bones could emerge as a problem, better preparing them to try to address it. The rush of practical information has pared back a sense of helplessness - and injected new energy and hope for many. Pearse has used the fear and frustration of her family's experience to fuel efforts to organize, helping found a patient advocacy group last fall, ReNU Syndrome United. 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His family just learned his diagnosis in April, thanks to a network of eagle-eyed moms - including Rae's - and a rapid-fire series of connections. 'Our sweet girl was diagnosed with a newly discovered genetic mutation last year,' Rae's mother, Leila Levi, of Bethesda, Maryland, wrote in a Facebook post on April 3. She's normally guarded about exposing her family's business on social media but wanted to share information about ReNU and a fundraising page for the D.C. families. Levi's law school classmate saw the post, thought the symptoms sounded familiar and told her friend, Sam's mom, Susannah Rosenblatt, who contacted Berger. He asked for Sam's raw data from previous genetic testing and easily pinpointed the added letter that Whiffin's team had identified. When Sam, 5, rolled up to the park in jeans and a blue fleece, Adeline took an interest. She's social, which her parents credit partly to her twin brother Oliver, who has pushed her from the start. 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Yahoo
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Don't miss the crescent moon shining close to Mars on May 31
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Fast Company
a day ago
- Fast Company
How white-tailed deer came back from the brink of extinction
Given their abundance in American backyards, gardens and highway corridors these days, it may be surprising to learn that white-tailed deer were nearly extinct about a century ago. While they currently number somewhere in the range of 30 million to 35 million, at the turn of the 20th century, there were as few as 300,000 whitetails across the entire continent: just 1% of the current population. This near-disappearance of deer was much discussed at the time. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau had written that no deer had been hunted near Concord, Massachusetts, for a generation. In his famous ' Walden,' he reported: 'One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here.' But what happened to white-tailed deer? What drove them nearly to extinction, and then what brought them back from the brink? As a historical ecologist and environmental archaeologist, I have made it my job to answer these questions. Over the past decade, I've studied white-tailed deer bones from archaeological sites across the eastern United States, as well as historical records and ecological data, to help piece together the story of this species. Precolonial rise of deer populations White-tailed deer have been hunted from the earliest migrations of people into North America, more than 15,000 years ago. The species was far from the most important food resource at that time, though. Archaeological evidence suggests that white-tailed deer abundance only began to increase after the extinction of megafauna species like mammoths and mastodons opened up ecological niches for deer to fill. Deer bones become very common in archaeological sites from about 6,000 years ago onward, reflecting the economic and cultural importance of the species for Indigenous peoples. Despite being so frequently hunted, deer populations do not seem to have appreciably declined due to Indigenous hunting prior to AD 1600. Unlike elk or sturgeon, whose numbers were reduced by Indigenous hunters and fishers, white-tailed deer seem to have been resilient to human predation. While archaeologists have found some evidence for human-caused declines in certain parts of North America, other cases are more ambiguous, and deer certainly remained abundant throughout the past several millennia. Human use of fire could partly explain why white-tailed deer may have been resilient to hunting. Indigenous peoples across North America have long used controlled burning to promote ecosystem health, disturbing old vegetation to promote new growth. Deer love this sort of successional vegetation for food and cover, and thus thrive in previously burned habitats. Indigenous people may have therefore facilitated deer population growth, counteracting any harmful hunting pressure. More research is needed, but even though some hunting pressure is evident, the general picture from the precolonial era is that deer seem to have been doing just fine for thousands of years. Ecologists estimate that there were roughly 30 million white-tailed deer in North America on the eve of European colonization—about the same number as today. Colonial-era fall of deer numbers To better understand how deer populations changed in the colonial era, I recently analyzed deer bones from two archaeological sites in what is now Connecticut. My analysis suggests that hunting pressure on white-tailed deer increased almost as soon as European colonists arrived. At one site dated to the 11th to 14th centuries (before European colonization) I found that only about 7% to 10% of the deer killed were juveniles. Hunters generally don't take juvenile deer if they're frequently encountering adults, since adult deer tend to be larger, offering more meat and bigger hides. Additionally, hunting increases mortality on a deer herd but doesn't directly affect fertility, so deer populations experiencing hunting pressure end up with juvenile-skewed age structures. For these reasons, this low percentage of juvenile deer prior to European colonization indicates minimal hunting pressure on local herds. However, at a nearby site occupied during the 17th century—just after European colonization—between 22% and 31% of the deer hunted were juveniles, suggesting a substantial increase in hunting pressure. This elevated hunting pressure likely resulted from the transformation of deer into a commodity for the first time. Venison, antlers and deerskins may have long been exchanged within Indigenous trade networks, but things changed drastically in the 17th century. European colonists integrated North America into a trans-Atlantic mercantile capitalist economic system with no precedent in Indigenous society. This applied new pressures to the continent's natural resources. Deer—particularly their skins—were commodified and sold in markets in the colonies initially and, by the 18th century, in Europe as well. Deer were now being exploited by traders, merchants and manufacturers desiring profit, not simply hunters desiring meat or leather. It was the resulting hunting pressure that drove the species toward its extinction. 20th-century rebound of white-tailed deer Thanks to the rise of the conservation movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white-tailed deer survived their brush with extinction. Concerned citizens and outdoorsmen feared for the fate of deer and other wildlife, and pushed for new legislative protections. The Lacey Act of 1900, for example, banned interstate transport of poached game and—in combination with state-level protections—helped end commercial deer hunting by effectively de-commodifying the species. Aided by conservation-oriented hunting practices and reintroductions of deer from surviving populations to areas where they had been extirpated, white-tailed deer rebounded.
