By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF
What can we learn from chimps and sheep and maybe even insects that practice medicine on themselves?
Chausiku was clearly sick. The chimpanzee was in her 30s, a chimp’s prime. She was usually a gentle, doting mother. But one day she built a nest in a tree, climbed in and lay down, letting her infant, a male named Chopin, roam unsupervised. Another female chimp began looking after Chopin while Chausiku rested.
Later that day, after Chausiku descended from the tree, a scientist named Michael Huffman noted that she could barely walk. Huffman wasn’t there to watch Chausiku specifically; he was studying older chimps, researching their social relationships in the troop. But Chausiku did something so out of the ordinary that it captured his attention: She sat down in front of a leafy plant, began pulling off branches, chewing their tips, spitting out the fibrous pulp and swallowing only the juice.
This was in Tanzania, in 1987, when Huffman was just starting his career as a primatologist. In nine months of watching Chausiku’s troop, he had never seen a chimp eat that plant. He asked his friend and research aide, a man named Mohamedi Seifu Kalunde, what it was. Kalunde hailed from the nearby Tongwe people and worked as a ranger at the chimp-research project in Mahale Mountains National Park. The plant Chausiku was chewing, Kalunde told him, was extremely bitter and could be poisonous in large quantities. But it was also “very powerful medicine.” The Tongwe used it to treat stomach ailments and parasite infections.
Huffman decided to abandon the other chimps he was trailing and focus on Chausiku. She went to bed early that evening and remained weak the next morning. The other female chimp continued to babysit for Chopin. But then, after the troop had settled down for its midday rest, Chausiku perked up and hurried away from the group. Huffman and Kalunde struggled to keep up as she moved through the forest, until she reached a spot near the edge of a swamp, where succulents and figs abounded. Chausiku began gorging. “She spends the next few hours stuffing her face as if she were really hungry,” Huffman recalls. When Kalunde told him the plant typically took about 24 hours to work, Huffman felt almost intoxicated by the possibility that he had just seen a chimp use medicine.
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