Latest news with #JaapdeRoode
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
The incredible world of animal medicine
Ian Sample meets Jaap de Roode, professor of biology at Emory University in Atlanta, and author of the book Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes and Other Animals Heal Themselves. De Roode explains how a chance discovery got him interested in animal medicine, the amazing ways that creatures use toxins to fight parasites and pathogens, and what humans have learnt about medicine from the animal world
Hindustan Times
24-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Doctors by Nature: An exclusive excerpt from a book about how animals heal themselves
Here's the good news: even by replacing just 10 percent of our lawns with diverse plant gardens, we can boost biodiversity, maintain insects, and provide medicinal plants for our pets. We may even use these gardens to grow medicinal plants for human use, which would help curb the overharvesting of some medicinal plants in the wild, and recreate the natural pharmacies that traditional healers rely on. Because of all these benefits, local and national governments are increasingly developing initiatives for individual households to create native habitats. In Germany, the Thousands of Gardens—Thousands of Species project aims to create oases of biodiversity, including gardens, balconies, and open spaces with a goal to curb insect declines. The project is funded in part by Germany's federal government and partners with seed companies, nurseries, and garden centers to provide seed packages to participants. In Minnesota, the Lawns to Legumes program provides grants to homeowners to develop natural gardens. In my home country of the Netherlands, an organization called The Pollinators provides free bags of seed mixes to create insect gardens. In (the American state of) Georgia, my new adopted home, I am on the board of directors of the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail, a nonprofit organization that aims to expand pollinator habitats. Initiated by former first lady Rosalynn Carter, the trail was established in 2013 and grew to almost two thousand gardens in the first ten years of its existence. As an organization, we provide guidance on what plants to use and how to maintain the gardens. We encourage people to plant native milkweeds to support monarch butterflies. My own lab provides milkweeds and other plants for participants in the metro-Atlanta area. It may seem like a small thing to create a garden, but if enough people do it, we can recreate a lot of much-needed nature. One common theme in this book has been that animals need choices. They do not just need shelter and food. They need medicine. And to get that, they need access to a diversity of plants and other natural products. Preserving nature is the best way to maintain their choices, and so is providing diverse gardens to pets, zoo animals, and our neighborhood insects. So, as you are building your garden, I invite you to take a moment to witness the spectacles of the natural world that will unfold there. Live in the moment and witness that ant, bee, or butterfly that visits your garden. Watch your cat or dog frolic in the flowers. And as you are watching, ask yourself: What is the animal doing? Is it eating? Is it drinking? Is it finding shelter? Or, maybe: Is it collecting medicine? (Excerpted with permission from Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves by Jaap de Roode, published by Princeton University Press; 2025)
Hindustan Times
24-05-2025
- Health
- Hindustan Times
Bug, MD: Meet the surgeons and doctors of the wild
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even hibernating bears do it. They self-medicate, and they do it better than us. Bears, for instance, eat willow bark after their long winter snooze. Rich in salicin, the bark helps cleanse the bear's system and ease the stiffness and aches that may have set in, during the still winter months. Incidentally, salicylic acid drawn from salicin is used in our painkillers too; it's helped us make aspirin since 1899. Now to more dramatic examples. Florida carpenter ants perform surgery on each other, to increase an injured buddy's chances of survival. A study published in the journal Current Biology last year detailed how an ant will bite off an injured colleague's infected upper leg to save its life, with a success rate of 90% for such amputations, against a survival rate of about 40% in cases where such an injury is left untreated. Meanwhile, earlier this year, a study published in the journal Science reported that mice sometimes perform a kind of CPR on each other. In their experiment, researchers drugged a mouse and waited for it to fall unconscious. When it did, a fellow mouse aggressively opened its mouth and pulled out its tongue, helping open its airways quite effectively. Such actions are not deliberate, in the way that we define deliberate, but they're not pure instinct either, says Jaap de Roode, a professor of biology at Atlanta's Emory University and author of the new book Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and other Animals Heal Themselves (Princeton University Press; March 2025). The book compiles findings from scientists around the world, and details observational studies and experiments on this intriguing subject. In modern science, the field is referred to as zoopharmacognosy (the study of animal self-medication). It is generally dated to the 1980s, when primatologist Michael Huffman and traditional healer Mohamedi Seifu Kalunde observed a mother chimpanzee in Tanzania ease a gut infection by swallowing the bitter leaves of the mjonso shrub, and then teach her infant to do the same. 'Back then, many Western scientists wouldn't believe it. They said there was no way animals could have the mental capacity to self-medicate, because they didn't have the intellect of humans,' de Roode says. 'With mounting scientific evidence, they started accepting it, but only because the chimpanzees are our distant cousins and have large brains.' Over time, of course, humans learnt (and grew to accept) that several species have tools, cultures and customs. They may not evolve, as our cultures do. But they are passed down: the paths to healing, the use of basic tools, the best ways to raise young. Winging it The point of his book, de Roode says, is to shatter our human-centric perspective. It drives much of what the 47-year-old does. His area of focus as a researcher, for instance, is the monarch butterfly. So, every year, at the St Marks Monarch Butterfly Festival in Florida, he holds specialised tours to explain why these orange-winged, polka-dotted creatures are 'expert doctors'. 'Insects are the most diverse group of animals on earth and they've been around for much longer — some 479 million years, against less than 200 million for mammals,' he tells them. Behind that ability to survive is a degree of adaptability to hurt — and a body of 'knowledge' about how to stay healthy. Both wood ants and honeybees, for instance, collect and apply resins to their nests and hives to keep bacteria and fungi away and protect the health of the colony. Woolly bear caterpillars eat as many as five plant species a day, to stock up on vital alkaloids. These nitrogen compounds are their primary line of defence when a tachinid fly lays eggs on them. As the larvae hatch, they chew on the little woolly bug. The alkaloids are toxic to the larvae, and this helps raise the caterpillar's odds of surviving (from 40% to 60%). The really interesting bit: the alkaloids can be toxic to the little caterpillar too. It has to 'know' just how much to ingest. Sage advice Even plants have 'learnt' how to protect themselves. Over time, as insects and animals evolved, plants began to encounter new threats, and developed the ability to produce toxins that work to stop these creatures from eating them. 'It is often these very compounds that act as medicines for animals — and for humans,' de Roode says. Humans also gathered knowledge as they evolved, and passed it down, even though they couldn't explain why certain herbs heal or why others go into a salve. And so it is that we are now discovering antioxidants and anticarcinogens in the things our grandparents told us to eat. 'Many of the scientific discoveries of the last decades are in fact rediscoveries of traditional knowledge,' de Roode writes. There could still be cures in plain sight, he adds. Researcher Cassandra Quave of Emory University is studying the sweet chestnut tree in her attempts to treat certain skin conditions, based on a tip she received from Italians and the Albanian Arbereshe community. At the University of Kinshasa in the Congo, Ulrich Maloueki is studying which elements in primate diets contain antimalarial agents, in attempts to develop new drugs for humans. We once ate food that doubled as medicine too. There are certain cultures (think of south India) that still largely adhere to seasonal eating habits, balance meals depending on time of day and time of year. In such cultures, as in the animal kingdom, food itself becomes the first line of defence against illness. In a world of rapid extinctions, this is something to think about too. 'It is not just the animals we are losing,' as de Roode puts it. 'With every animal we lose, we lose another medical expert and another opportunity to discover new compounds that we may want to develop as medicines for ourselves.'
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Paging Dr Chimp: the medical secrets we can learn from apes, birds and even butterflies
In Mexico City, house sparrows and house finches are picking up cigarette butts and weaving individual fibres into the lining of their nests. When researchers first discovered the butts – while studying what plastics end up in nests – they assumed it was simply a fluffy material being used as insulation. But through a series of ingenious tests, they discovered that the butts were actually medicinal: the birds actively collected them because the toxin nicotine reduces mites and other blood-sucking parasites. The birds are treating themselves – and their offspring. It's one of many fascinating examples of animals medicating themselves revealed in Doctors By Nature, a new book by the US-based Dutch academic Jaap de Roode. Apes deliberately swallow leaves to dislodge intestinal worms. Caterpillars switch diets to repel parasitic flies. Bees incorporate sticky resins in their homes to combat disease. Our medicinal skills were once considered a key difference between humans and other animals. 'In western society, we love being unique,' says De Roode, speaking from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is professor of biology at Emory University. 'We come up with all sorts of characteristics – it's tools, it's walking upright, it's big brains, it's language, it's culture, it's medicine. And all of those things we debunk, one after another – and discover that we're just another animal. I'm cool with that. I think what makes us unique is the wish to be unique.' In fact, as De Roode points out, our knowledge of medicine probably began as mimicry – by observing and copying animal teachers. And today, a greater understanding of how other animals use natural medicines may in turn help us to find new cures for human diseases, as well as keep our livestock healthier and more productive. The sparrows and finches in Mexico City are De Roode's favourite example because they have adapted so quickly to a human environment. 'Instead of collecting plants like a lot of wild birds, finches and sparrows found a shortcut and went for the cigarette butts littered around their nests, and it keeps these bloodsuckers like lice and ticks away. It's an example of the birds helping their chicks rather than themselves.' De Roode began his studies by making a similar discovery in monarch butterflies. These large orange butterflies are famed for their epic migrations between Mexico and northern America, but they are afflicted by a single-celled parasite called ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE). Millions of black parasitic spores form on their skin, causing weight loss and dehydration. Many afflicted butterflies die on their migrations. Through a series of experiments, De Roode discovered that monarch caterpillars eat a toxic class of chemicals called cardenolides in the plant milkweed. The variety of tropical milkweed has more cardenolides than its sister plant swamp milkweed, and tests found that 20% fewer of the caterpillars that ate tropical milkweed became infected with OE. Further studies revealed that female butterflies infected with OE laid more eggs on the medicinal tropical milkweed than on the non-medicinal plants. De Roode believes that they are trying to protect their children by doing so. 'When you think about how evolution and natural selection works, there's so many things that parents do for their offspring – maybe it's not that strange,' says De Roode. As he writes in the book: 'Animals with brains smaller than a pinhead can be just as good at medicating as those with brains like our own.' All medicine begins with plants and fungi. Most plants can't move, and so need to produce chemicals that will defend them from attack. Cocaine, for instance, is a substance deployed by coca plants to repel hungry insects by messing up their nervous systems and causing tremors and death. 'Plants and fungi provide a vast pharmacy that humans and other animals can use to find drugs to battle their parasites and pathogens,' writes De Roode. One of the first known human medics was Ötzi the Iceman, whose 5,300-year-old body was discovered in the Alps in 1991. His gut contained the eggs of a parasitic worm, and he carried two cork-shaped fruiting bodies of the birch polypore fungus, well known to have antibiotic and laxative effects, suggesting that the neolithic man was treating his infection. Since then, it's been discovered that Neanderthals were using medicine 50,000 years ago. The early humans may have made their medicinal discoveries by following the examples of other animals. The modern scientific field of animal medication began in the 1980s when the primatologist Michael A Huffman and Mohamedi Seifu Kalunde, a Tanzania national parks ranger, observed a chimpanzee, Chausiku, fall ill. Chausiku stopped at a shrub Huffman had not seen the chimps feed on before and chewed on the pith of a branch. Kalunde told Huffman that the local people used the leaves of the plant, bitter leaf, as a traditional medicine treating stomach upsets, diarrhoea and intestinal parasites. They kept following Chausiku, who built herself a nest and rested. The day after she ate bitter leaf, to their amazement, she got up and was leaping about with her daughter again. Huffman took plant samples back to his university and found they contained a class of chemicals known for their medicinal value against parasitic worms, bacteria and even cancerous tumours. Huffman's further studies of other individual chimps proved beyond doubt that they were using this plant – and others – deliberately for medicine. As scientists such as Michael Singer, a professor of environmental studies at Wesleyan University, point out, one of the definitions of medicine is that it comes with a cost: drugs have side-effects, and this bitter leaf was unpleasant to take. Since then, primatologists have found that 25 different wild primate species across 26 countries use plants with well-described medicinal properties. Domesticated animals are still smart enough to possess what scientists call 'nutritional wisdom': they listen to their gut. Worm-infested livestock seek out tannin-rich shrubs, which, when eaten, can kill worms. In another revealing experiment, two groups of calves were given different foods. One was given a ready-mixed portion of grains and hay. The other was allowed to choose from a buffet of the same foods. The buffet calves actually ate less but gained just as much weight as the calves given a ready-mixed ration. So the cost of producing a kilo of beef fell by 20% when animals were given a choice. In the wild, free-ranging ruminants may eat up to 50 plant species a day. It's not hard to see the health (and productivity) benefits if livestock are given more naturalistic management – in cows' cases, a more varied diet and, ideally, outdoor grazing in plant-rich pastures with hedges, rather than grass monocultures. For instance, the organic farmer Rosamund Young has noticed that, if sick, her free-ranging cows seek out willow bark or buds, a source of salicylic acid, a chemical compound altered by chemists to produce aspirin. De Roode finds similar lessons with honeybees, which seem increasingly afflicted by deadly mites and other pathogens. Bees use propolis – a glue-like substance they collect from plants – to stick things together, smooth surfaces and fill up crevices. Beekeepers have, over time, selected bees that don't produce as much propolis, as it is so sticky it becomes a nuisance for them. However, this was a bad move. Humans have used propolis as a medicine for thousands of years (most recently against HIV) and, unsurprisingly, it is deployed by bee colonies to protect themselves from pathogens. Experiments by Marla Spivak at the University of Minnesota and Michael Simone-Finstrom found that bee colonies infected by a fungus dispatched more bees to collect propolis for their hives. When hives were afflicted by chalkbrood, a disease that affects honeybee larvae, the adult bees incorporated more of this medicinal resin in their nests. Modern hives with smooth wooden interiors have discouraged the production of propolis, but De Roode explains how simple experimental tweaks in hive design in the US are encouraging honeybees to produce more of it again. Using rough wood instead of smooth, and adding internal grooves to the wood, encourages bees to produce more propolis, leading to bigger, healthier colonies. 'Humans have used propolis for so long as a health supplement but didn't make the link that maybe it helps bees. That stems from the idea that we're the only ones who know medicine,' says De Roode. He hopes his book will challenge that mistaken sense of superiority. It's also a powerful message to halt the extinction crisis. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a research group is following chimps and bonobos and extracting chemicals from the plants they use. 'We need all sorts of creative ways to find new drugs, especially with all the antibiotic resistance,' says De Roode. Destroying biodiversity means losing not only plants and fungi with valuable future medicinal uses, but also losing our teachers. 'For every lost plant species, we lose another potential drug for infectious disease or cancer. For every lost animal, we lose another potential pharmacist or doctor,' De Roode says. 'You can protect nature because you think it's the right thing to do. Or you can do it because it also helps us, and those things come together.' Doctors by Nature – How Ants, Apes and Other Animals Heal Themselves by Jaap de Roode is published by Princeton University Press (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
