Wild chimpanzees filmed with Forest ‘First Aid help’

Chimpanzees in Uganda have been observed using medicinal plants – in several ways – to treat open wounds and other injuries.

Scientists from the University of Oxford, together with a local team in the Budongo -forest, filmed and recorded the animals’ incidents and used plants for first aid, both in themselves and occasionally on each other.

Their research builds on the discovery last year that chimpanzee is looking for and looking for certain plants to be self -medication.

The scientists have also put together for decades of scientific observations to create a catalog of the different ways in which chimpanzees use “Bos First Aid”.

Researchers say that the study, published in the magazine Frontiers in ecology and evolutionContributes to a growing number of evidence that primates, including chimpanzees, orangoutans and gorillas, use natural medicines in a number of ways to stay healthy in the wild.

Main researcher Elodie Freymann explained that there was “a whole behavioral repertoire that use chimpanzees when they are sick or injured in the wild – to treat themselves and retain hygiene.”

“Some of these include the use of plants that can be found here,” she explained. “The chimpanzees dab them on their wounds or chew the plants and then apply the chewed material to the open injury.”

The researchers studied images of a very young, female chimpanzee -chewing plant material and brought it to an injury on his mother’s body.

They also found records of chimpanzees who tend the wounds of other animals with which they were not related. This is very exciting, Dr. Freymann out, “because it contributes to the evidence that wild chimpanzees have the ability to empathy”.

Some of the hundreds of written observations that Dr. Freymann and her colleagues studied came from a logbook at the field station in the forest location, which is located northwest of the capital Kampala.

This record of anecdotal evidence dates from the nineties – local field staff, researchers and visitors have written and describe all the interesting behavior they have observed.

There are stories in that book of leaf waste on injuries and chimpanzees that help other chimpanzees to remove bows from their limbs.

There are some surprisingly human hygiene habits: one note describes a chimpanzee who uses leaves to wipe themselves after pooping.

This team of researchers has previously identified some of the plants that chimpanzees were looking for and ate when they were injured. The scientists took samples of those plants, tested them and discovered that most antibacterial properties had.

Chimpanzees are not the only non-human monkeys with clear knowledge of vegetable medicine. A recent study showed a wild oranguatan using chewed leaf material to cure a face wound.

Scientists think that studying this Wild APE behavior – and more understanding about the plants that use chimpanzees when they are sick or injured – can help to find new medicines.

“The more we learn about chimpanzee behavior and intelligence, the more I think we will understand how little we as people really know about the natural world,” said Dr. Freymann to BBC News.

“If I were to be plotted here in this forest without food and not a medicine, I doubt that I could survive for a long time, especially if I was injured or sick.”

“But chimpanzees thrive here because they know how to have access to the secrets of this place and how they can find everything they need to survive from their environment.”