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Monos con máscaras en los ojos, cabeza y boca

Something strange happened 35 years ago, when primatologist Mike Huffman was studying a group of chimpanzees in western Tanzania.

Chausiku, one of the females, left her baby with the others, climbed a tree and lay down in a nest that she had made.

"It's unusual for chimps to sleep during the day," Huffman explains.

But then came the extraordinary.

Chausiku came down from the tree, took the infant from her, walked slowly and with difficulty, followed by the group, until she sat down in front of a bush.

"His name is mjonso," Huffman was told by his research assistant Mohamedi Seifu Kalunde, a renowned Tongu expert on the local flora who was trained by his parents and grandparents in the art of herbal medicine. "It is a very powerful and important medicine for us."

Indeed, what in Spanish is called bitter vernonia (Vernonia amygdalina), is used by the Tongues to treat malaria, intestinal parasites, diarrhea and an upset stomach.

And many other groups in tropical Africa and Central America - who know it by various names but generally as "bitter leaf" - also use it to treat ailments such as malarial fever, schistosomiasis, amoebic dysentery and other intestinal parasites and stomach pain.

Vernonia amygdalina

Chausiku tore some branches, removed the leaves, which ingested in large quantities can be lethal, and the bark.

The funny thing - besides the fact that it was not a plant that these primates normally consumed - was that he chewed the marrow but then spit out the fibers.

Could it be that the chimpanzee was doing it not to feed but to feel better?

In other words, he was deliberately using it as a medicine?

 

The next day
Chausiku went to sleep in his nest earlier than usual.

Chausiku con su hijo Chopin.

The next day, Huffman and Kalunde noted that she continued to feel ill: she needed to rest often, moved slowly, and ate little.

Suddenly, about 24 hours after ingesting the bitter sap of mjonso, everything changed. The chimpanzee ran through the forest to a swampy meadow where she devoured large quantities of figs, ginger marrow, and elephant grass.

The observations Huffman and Kalunde made during those two days in November 1987 became the first documented evidence of an animal consuming a plant with medicinal properties and recovering.

Had they discovered animal medicine?

 

Deep connection
While it is true that this was the first scientific evidence of self-medication in animals, Huffman emphasizes that it is not a discovery but a "rediscovery" of something that some cultures let slip into oblivion.

But not all.

Mohamedi Seifu Kalunde y Mike Huffman

Among the Tongues, for example, that deep connection with nature was still alive.

"We know from our tradition that when animals get sick, they look for plants to improve themselves, so we use those plants to treat our ailments as well," Kalunde explained to Huffman.

The episode with Chausiku was also not the first time scientists had observed what seemed like self-medication in the animal kingdom.

More than a decade earlier, primatologist Richard Wrangham and his colleagues saw that chimpanzees often swallowed whole leaves without chewing, and they wondered if they did so to cure parasitic infections.

They even coined the term zoopharmacognosia - from the Greek zoo ("animal"), pharmacon ("drug or medicine") and gnosy ("knowledge") - to describe behavior.

But they couldn't prove that these leaves contained chemicals toxic to parasites, or that the chimpanzees were sick in the first place or that they were cured after self-medicating, so they couldn't overcome the skepticism.

Chimpancé de Tanzania Mahale Mountains National Park

Aware of this, Huffman arranged for his fellow biochemists to analyze Vernonia amygdalina; They found more than a dozen new compounds with antiparasitic properties.

In addition, the primatologist collected fecal samples from the Chausiku group and found that after they chewed the bitter plant, the parasite eggs in the feces decreased by up to 90% in one day.

Furthermore, subsequent observations showed that they tended to chew more bitter leaf during the rainy season, when parasites were most abundant.

"That was the beginning of this journey that I embarked on 35 or more years ago," during which time Huffman, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan, became a leading expert on animal self-medication.

Chowsiku and its bitter leaf plant were the key to further studies, which showed that event was far from unique.

In fact, we now know that this type of behavior goes far beyond that of chimpanzees. Other mammals, birds, and even insects have been seen to treat their own diseases in different ways.

loros

 

Strange habit
Huffman himself began investigating reports from another place in Tanzania where monkeys had "the strange habit of taking rough leaves and folding them into their mouths and swallowing them."

"For years I looked for a system to properly study this type of behavior", until he discovered "that they were actually expelling parasites."

Because the leaves are difficult to digest, they "decrease the amount of time it takes for food to pass through the intestinal tract"; they were cleaning his system. "In exactly 6 hours, they expelled the parasites."

After discussing it with colleagues, they began to investigate. Today it is known that there are 40 different species of rough leaves that 17 different po[CENSORED]tions of chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas use to rid themselves of their parasites.

And primates are not the only ones to use that technique.

"Now we know that small mammals like the civet also fold and swallow leaves and expel parasites, and large ones like the brown bear and the black bear.

gansos de nieve canadienses

"Also the Canadian snow geese, usually the young ones, who do it just before migrating in the winter, when they go south and have a long way to go. They clean their systems before going through this long and stressful period without being able to feed." .

 

Not only that...
"Last year there was a really interesting observation in Borneo of orangutans chewing on certain plants, but not swallowing them but grinding them with their teeth into a paste that was then rubbed for 15 to 45 minutes," he told the BBC Dr Kim Walker of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.

"What's really interesting is that it was the same plant that the local human po[CENSORED]tion used for joint pain."

"There are many, many animals that use all kinds of drugs to treat their own pathogens and infections," says Jaap De Rhoda, a biologist at Emory University, Atlanta, USA. "But I was interested in understanding whether animals with brains smaller and more different from us could also use forms of medication. "

And the insects turned out to be a group of animals that have developed a wide range of different medication strategies.

An example is monarch butterflies, which when they are caterpillars can only eat milkweed or milkweed plants ... and these plants contain chemicals called cardenolides, which make them toxic.

mariposa monarca

Butterflies are immune to these compounds that build up in their system and protect them from predators. But in addition, the milkweed species that have higher concentrations of these compounds, defend them from a deadly parasite: Ophrycocystis Electroscirrha.

The question is whether, when sick, monarch butterflies specifically seek out those medicinal species of milkweed.

"To our great surprise, we discovered a strong preference among infected monarchs to lay their eggs in those medicinal plants that will reduce the infection in their future offspring; those that are not infected, they choose at random."

And there is another fragile, small and lazy creature who has medical knowledge.

 

Lost knowledge
"Honey bees have different ways of treating their infections," says De Rhoda.

"One example is that they collect resins from trees, the sticky substance that trees produce as a defense.

"Bees mix it with their wax, use it in their hives, and it's proven to reduce the growth of all kinds of pathogens."

abejas en colmena

Not only does it serve as a defense in their homes but "now they have also been shown to consume it, to reduce disease in their own body."

For De Rhoda, "one of the interesting things about this is to think that medicine is a profession that can evolve over time, but that it can also be lost. And what we are seeing with bees."

"The stickiness is annoying so, over the years, beekeepers inadvertently eliminated this drug by selecting bees that used less resin."

"Now we should rethink things and let the bees collect their own medicines that they have been using for millions of years, because that can really benefit the colonies and therefore the beekeepers."

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