We are sick, there are hospitals and pharmacies to provide us with treatment and medicine, but what if the animals that live in the wild are sick?
In fact, many animals, such as elephants, chimpanzees, lizards, and even bees, have a little medical skill, and can collect herbs for themselves and heal their wounds. These herbs can make them feel better, or aid digestion, or prevent disease, or kill parasites, bacteria, viruses, and so on.
How to tell if an animal is taking medicine?
The first scientist to notice animal self-healing behavior was Yasunari Nishida, a zoologist at Kyoto University in Japan. Yasunari Nishida, an expert on chimpanzees, led a team of Japanese zoologists on a field trip to the Mahale Mountains region of Tanzania, Africa, where they observed that chimpanzees ate the leaves of a double-edged snail. At that time, he was very confused, because this leaf did not have any nutritional value.
Later, a climatologist at Harvard University observed a similar case at the Gombe River Wildlife Sanctuary in the northern Makhale Mountains, where a chimpanzee swallowed the entire plant leaf without even chewing it. Since then, many scientists have found that many other animals have similar behaviors, indicating that this is not an accident, it is likely that the animals deliberately did it. But everyone doesn't understand what this behavior of the animals means.
It wasn't until 1996 that Michael Herffman, a zoologist at Kyoto University in Japan, suggested that the chimpanzees might be self-medicating. Because he observed that the leaf was actually poisonous, the gorillas usually did not touch it at all, and a constipated chimpanzee ate it and recovered the next day. A local traditional healer also told Huffman that their natives would medicate the leaves of the plant, so Huffman speculated that chimpanzees ate the leaves because they could cure diseases.
The surface of the leaves of this plant is a lot of short, hard coats, which are very rough to the touch, and the taste must be very bad. Herfman believes that chimpanzees eat it because it is rough, like sandpaper, which can wash the stomach and intestines and remove parasites.
Huffman was the first scientist to delve into the self-healing behavior of animals, and he also established a set of guidelines to determine which plants are the best medicine for animals, after all, they eat a lot of things every day. This set of guidelines is very simple, with only 4 articles, so it is widely used as soon as it is proposed:
1, this plant is not on the animal's daily recipe, usually basically do not eat it;
2, this plant hardly provides any nutrients for animals;
3, this plant will be consumed in large quantities at certain times of the year (such as the rainy season), which is the season when animals are infected with a large number of parasites;
4) Other healthy individuals in the population will not eat it.
If these criteria are met, then this plant is the animal's precious medicinal herb. Researchers have observed more than 40 species of such plants.
The healing of bonobos was discovered
The latest study by German researcher Barbara Frus confirms Hefman's hypothesis that these behaviors by animals are indeed self-medicating.
Barbara has been studying bonobos since 1990. Bonobos, also known as pygmy chimpanzees, are so named because they are slimmer and slimmer than chimpanzees. In October 2007 and June 2009, Barbara led the research team to the Congo Basin in Africa twice to conduct field expeditions.
The group of bonobos observed live on the edge of sarunga National Park in the Republic of the Congo, 25 kilometers from the nearest village. Researchers track bonobos on foot every day, trekking through mountains and waters, climbing trees and climbing vines. They carefully observed and recorded every movement of the bonobos, not even a few chews per minute. They observed that bonobos would pull off the leaves of a vine in whole, wet them with spit on their tongues, and then roll them into rolls and swallow them without chewing.
It is a vine of the Family Euphorbia. Barbara found that the vine was not part of the bonobo's daily diet, and that the bonobos ingested it in large numbers during the period of parasite outbreaks. This meets the criteria proposed by Herfman, so this plant should be the herb of the bonobo.
The plant's leaf surfaces are also covered with a large number of villi, which are composed of silica, which can speed up gastrointestinal motility, reducing the time it takes for food to pass through the intestines from the original 35 hours to 6 hours. The researchers also scrutinized stool samples from bonobos and found tiny parasites stuck to silica hairs. It seems that sick bonobos eat leaves indeed to clean up the parasites in their intestines.
A variety of self-healing techniques
There are many other animals with medical skills, such as the spitting chicken (commonly known as the turkey) that lives in southern North America. When baby turkeys are poured into soup chickens by heavy rain, their parents force them to swallow a bitter herb, benzoin leaves, to prevent colds. There are also gluttonous wild cats that, if they accidentally eat poisonous things, will rush to find quinoa grass. The alkaloids contained in this bitter, poisonous quinoa grass can cause a vomiting reaction. After the poisonous things are spit out, the wild cat naturally gets better.
In addition to taking the medicine internally, some animals will also take the medicine externally. Someone once caught a gibbon in the Americas, found a large pimple on its waist, and thought it had some tumor. Ding Qing took a look and found that it was the gibbon who had been injured, and the big knot was a bunch of chewed incense leaves that he had applied to himself. This incense leaf has anti-inflammatory properties and is also used by local Indians to heal wounds.
Animals use not only herbs to treat diseases, but also many strange things, such as "mountain tears". Hunters in Uzbekistan often encounter the strange thing that injured animals always run to a cave. One day, when an injured yellow sheep was running in the direction of the cave again, the curious hunter finally couldn't help it, decided to find out, and quietly followed. As a result, the yellow sheep ran to the cave wall and pressed its injured body against the stone wall. It didn't take long for the injured sheep to stop bleeding and regain its strength. Hunters found a viscous liquid on the stone wall pasted by the yellow sheep, like black wild honey, which the locals call "mountain tears". Injured animals use it to treat their wounds. Later, scientists studied "mountain tears" and found that they contained more than 30 trace elements that could promote wound healing. If it is used to treat fractures, it is much more effective than general treatment.
What's more, many birds also make their own "medicinal baths"! The drug used is formic acid, which is one of the most effective in removing parasites from the skin. A forest red ant can produce 2 milligrams of formic acid, equivalent to 18% of its body weight, and can spray 20 centimeters away in a critical situation. Many birds know this beauty of ant acid, so they deliberately destroy the nest with their mouths, provoke the ant, and then spread their wings to cover the nest. When the ant rushes against the enemy, it will spray a large amount of ant acid, so that the bird has a free "medicinal bath" to wash.
Was medicine innate or learned?
But where did the animals' ability to self-medicate come from? For example, how do finches such as sparrows learn to collect cigarette butts (in which nicotine can reduce mite infections in bird's nests)? How do bees and tree ants know how to use resin to fight bacteria?
Some self-healing methods are obviously only recently learned, such as the fact that finches have not been collecting cigarette butts in large quantities for a long time, after all, cigarettes have been around for less than two hundred years. However, more treatments have a long evolutionary history.
One of the simplest evolutionary routes is this: One day millions of years ago, an animal, such as a gorilla, had unbearable stomach pains, and for some unknown fortuitous reason, it ate a certain plant and the result felt much better. Then it remembers the experience and will go to the plant when it has stomach pains in the future.
Mark Hunt, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at the University of Michigan in the United States, believes that this is a very reasonable hypothesis. It may be that some mutation caused the gorillas to try plants that they would not normally eat, and felt healthier after eating them. As a result, this mutant type of gorilla lives longer and has more offspring, and slowly this behavior is preserved.
So how will these self-healing skills be passed on to the next generation?
Intelligent creatures, such as apes, have the ability to impart knowledge to their offspring, observe each other, and can communicate through sounds and gestures. Thus, the art of the offspring is learned from the mother and then intensified as they notice the beneficial effects of various plants.
But for organisms like fruit flies and bees that are largely brainless and have no elders to "teach" them, the ability to self-heal may be passed on to the next generation through genetic memory, which becomes an innate, instinctive behavior. Fruit flies, for example, use alcohol to protect themselves from parasitic wasps, while the black-veined golden-spotted butterfly lays its eggs on a small shrub in the oleander family called marigus tendons, which also have antiparasitic properties.
The application prospect is broad
Scientists who study animal self-healing behavior believe that humans can learn from animals, especially when it comes to finding new drugs. Many folk remedies and medicines, especially in underdeveloped countries and regions, are learned by traditional healers such as witch doctors by observing the self-healing behavior of animals.
Researchers at Emory University in the United States have studied the marly tendons that the black-veined golden-spotted butterfly likes, and found that the black-veined golden-spotted butterfly uses the cardiotonic steroid secreted by the marily tendons to resist parasites. Cardiotonic steroid is a steroid, usually toxic, with cardiotonic effects, and is now often used clinically as a cardiotonic agent, but also for pain relief and adjuvant treatment of asthma.
Animal pharmacognosy is a new discipline established on the basis of studying the self-healing behavior of animals, and its main task is to discover new drugs by observing the behavior of animals.
In addition to discovering new drugs, understanding the self-healing behavior of animals is also very helpful for animal husbandry. For example, after sheep are infected with intestinal nematodes, they will choose plants rich in tannins to eat. Although tannic acid has a bad taste and astringent taste, it can kill parasites and reduce infection. Knowing this, pastures can supplement sheep with tannic acid-rich plants during the parasite outbreak season to prevent and treat parasitic infections, thereby improving the quality and yield of livestock products.