Deep within an Indonesian rainforest, a team of research scientists recorded something that had never been captured before: a Sumatran orangutan they’d affectionately named Rakus carefully treating a nasty gash on his cheek with a plant proven to have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, and antioxidant properties.
“Only a few days following this treatment, the terrible wound began healing and within a couple of days, it had closed completely,” says Isabelle Laumer, a cognitive biologist and primatologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the lead author of a newly published study describing the event. “[This] is the first observation of a wild animal actually treating his wound precisely with a medical plant.”
The observation offers a new perspective on natural healing methods and behaviors and where these inclinations may have originated.
“We often lose sight of the fact that modern medicine is derived from a very ancient system of knowledge that began millions of years ago in a variety of habitats about which our knowledge is only beginning to expand,” says Mary Ann Raghanti, a biological anthropologist and the chair of the anthropology department at Kent State University. “From an evolutionary point of view, this instance provides a window into how our own ancestors may have developed their natural pharmacy.”
The recorded event transpired during the summer of 2022, at the Suaq Balimbing research station within the Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia.
This photo of adult flanged male, Rakus, was taken on June 23, 2022, two days before the orangutan began applying the plant mash to his wound.
Photograph by Armas
The rainforest surrounding the research center is home to the highest density of Sumatran orangutans on the planet. Their habitat has been increasingly destroyed by deforestation, however, requiring more and more of these otherwise solitary creatures to live closer and closer together. Estimates show that only some 14,600 Sumatran orangutans still exist, and the species are considered critically endangered by the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute in Washington DC.
Since 1994, these orangutangs have resided in or frequented the protected forest around the research center. There, researchers carefully follow, monitor, and record the movements and behaviors of the primates in a non-invasive, observational manner.
“The animals are never disturbed, and, over the decades, have gotten used to having our teams nearby, so they’ve learned to ignore our presence and they live completely as wild beings,” Laumer says.
By observing and sharing the extraordinary behaviors of critically endangered great apes, Laumer and her colleagues hope people realize just how special and human-like these creatures really are and inspire efforts to save them from extinction.
It’s a hope shared by other researchers in the fields of primatology, ethnobotany, and biological and evolutionary anthropology.
Rakus becomes wounded
Rakus has been living in and around the research center since 2009. One June morning in 2022, the researchers there observed that he had suffered a deep gash on his cheek under his right eye. Because he had wandered outside of the research area, no one witnessed how the injury occurred—though the researchers have two working hypotheses.
One is that Rakus fell from a tree and got hit by a branch on the way down. Because Sumatran orangutans spend about 98 percent of their time living, sleeping, and foraging in trees, Laumer says, and because some orangutangs can reach up to 300 pounds (Rakus is likely closer to 200 pounds), they sometimes grab onto dead or dying branches that can’t hold their weight and plummet 30 feet or more until other branches or the ground breaks their fall.
The other possibility is that Rakus was wounded during a fight with another orangutang. Laumer says that fights within this region of the rainforest are rare but can occur when males try to establish dominance. Rakus was between 30 and 32 years when the injury occurred, she explains, and had only recently developed his flanges—the prominent face cheek pads for which orangutangs are known that develop due to an increase in testosterone during sexual maturation.
Laumer says the day before the wound was discovered, Rakus and other orangutangs had been “long calling” from the trees—a behavior that frequently occurs when a male establishes dominance, something that also often indicates “fights may be going on.”
How Rakus treated the wound
Regardless of how the injury occurred, the team observed Rakus’s wound continuing to fester “and appear quite ghastly” over the next few days, Laumer says. On the third day, the researchers observed him navigating to some climbing plants called Akar Kuning—botanicals commonly used by humans as treatment for wounds and conditions such as dysentery, diabetes, and malaria.
The team watched Rakus seek out and then eat the plant, which itself was highly unusual behavior. “Our data shows this orangutan population only eats these plants 0.3 percent of the time,” Laumer notes.
If Rakus’s wound had become infected or he had a fever, his consumption of this plant could have theoretically helped. It excited the team to consider that he may be using the plant for this purpose, though they were only speculating.
What happened next, however, seemed undeniably deliberate.
“We observed Rakus detach the leaves of the plant and chew them without swallowing,” Laumer explains, referring to the Akar Kuning plant. “He then repeatedly put the liquid he extracted from the plant directly onto his wound.”
He continued nursing the wound this way for seven minutes and then consumed more of the plant for about 30 minutes.
“It’s important to note that he only put the plant’s liquid precisely on the wound and he didn’t rub it anywhere else on his body,” Laumer emphasizes. Afterward, he placed a somewhat solid portion of the leaf over the area, “just like a wound poultice,” she says. Incredibly, the next day the team observed him returning to eat the plant again. Three days later, the wound had closed and appeared to be healing nicely. Within a month, its scar was barely noticeable.
Kent State’s Raghanti calls the moment “a remarkable discovery,” but notes, “it isn’t exceptionally surprising given the intelligence of orangutans.”
How Rakus learned to treat a wound
Laumer agrees that these creatures possess exceptional intelligence, and says it makes it harder to speculate how Rakus could have known the plant would heal his face.
“It could be that he was just feeding on the plant and then accidentally touched his wound with the hand that had been touching it and its pain-relieving properties were immediately felt so he applied it to the area again and again,” she says.
It’s also possible that he’d been taught the behavior at a young age by his mother or another orangutang through a practice called peering.
“A hallmark of primates, and particularly of great apes, is an extended juvenile period which facilitates an extraordinary amount of learning,” explains Raghanti. For their first seven to eight years, mother orangutans care for their offspring intensively, she says, so Rakus could have learned this from her. Migrant adult orangutangs have also been observed engaging in peering, so he could have picked up the behavior later in life as well.
It’s also possible that the last common ancestor shard by humans and great apes followed some form of this behavior.
“This new finding highlights the resourcefulness and adaptive intelligence of these animals in their natural environment, contributing to our knowledge of animal behavior, medicinal plant use, and the potential evolutionary origins of human medicine,” says Ina Vandebroek, a noted ethnobotanist and senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, who was not involved in the study.
Primates have used plants before, but differently
This isn’t the first time wild primates have been observed chewing, swallowing, or associating with plants that have therapeutic properties.
In the early 1960s, for instance, famed primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall first described the presence of whole leaves of therapeutic plants in the feces of chimpanzees in Tanzania. Since that time, other primate populations have been observed eating or using plants, insects, or other means to try and clean or soothe their wounds or other ailments.
Anne Pusey, a distinguished professor emerita of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, says the practice of wild primates swallowing leaves to “trap gut parasites that are then expelled, or chewing plants with known medicinal properties during times of increased risk of disease,” are behaviors that are becoming increasingly well-documented. “But evidence like this for the tending of wounds with potentially biologically active materials is much more tenuous.”
She acknowledges instances where other wild primates have wiped or cleaned their wounds with plants before, “but the leaves used in those instances were not identified.” She also cites recent research that shows chimpanzees in Gabon rubbing insects in wounds “as a fascinating but incomplete story because the insect and its properties have not yet been identified.”
Rakus’s behavior “is important because the leaves used have well-known medicinal properties, the application process was long and deliberate, and the wound was seen to heal quite quickly,” she explains. “The fact that this has only been observed once in the study population leaves many questions unanswered about the origin of the behavior, but it adds to the idea that self-medication may have very deep evolutionary roots in our lineage.”
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