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Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- RenThraysk 2y agoIt's interesting for sure, but the mystery is how he gained that knowledge. Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do or his ancestors?
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- snikeris 2y agoAren’t we faced with the same fundamental mystery of human insight? Where does it come from?
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- elboru 2y agoTrial and error?
- JohnMakin 2y agoBingo. We only know which mushrooms that are tasty or give us a fun time because a lot of people died finding out.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoThere's also cheating : isn't coffee bean edibility observed from goats? essentially outsourced trial and error is a thing too.
- GreenWatermelon 2y agoWhich is exactly what we do with lab mice.
- polishdude20 2y agoNot only that. A lot of mushrooms can be eaten in small doses but will cause things like stomach upset well before death. I'd bet we as a species would quickly test mushrooms this way without dieing.
- RenThraysk 2y agoAt some period in our evolution, it gave us pre-dispositions to certain tastes. Like our fondness for sweet & salty is universal.
- dorn-1845 2y agoWe have systematized these pursuits. Even before modern science, language could be used to crudely pool together individual trial and error as a huge force multiplier.
- dhosek 2y agoI’ve often wondered how the heck did people invent soap? What made them think mix ashes and fat together and use the result to make stuff cleaner? (And that’s ignoring the fact that at a molecular level, soap is pretty amazing in and of itself.)
- oldman_peter 2y agoroasting meat, fat dripping in the ashes. At some point someone wondered the next day "hm, that's funny"
- aitchnyu 2y agoSome tribes have a drug with sophisticated preparation steps from multiple plants and they claim the plants spoke to them about their ability. Carrots were pencil thin woody roots, almonds were fatal, bananas were half rock hard seeds, rice was just another grass, wolves were skittish and bare their teeth at humans. How did ancient humans see potential in them?
- int_19h 2y agoI would imagine that a lot of wild plants that we regard as not particularly edible can look much more enticing when that's basically your only choice of food. As far as wolves, it's still an open question as to how much they "self-domesticated" before humans noticed and started working from the other end. Seeing how human encampments would produce delicious food scraps in refuse (and still do, just ask any black bear!), it stands to reason that some animals would try to cash in on that opportunity. Then you have a selection process whereby the ones that are too skittish would not even bother, and the ones that are too aggressive would be chased away or worse.
- manx 2y agoThe book "Guns Germs and Steel" has some good answers to that question.
- observationist 2y agoMore than likely the plant has a noticeable topical anesthetic effect - Orangutans don't have an explicit mechanism for passing abstract knowledge so the phenomena has to be explained subjectively. It might be a particular cooling effect, or something recognizable about the plant that it contrasted against an injury for which it didn't use the plant. Or it observed another ape that did have such a subjective effect and comparison - the Einstein of orangutans might have figured it out generations ago and they've been imitating a successful behavior since then. The plant has been studied and analyzed, with various papers out there, like this one, but there doesn't seem to be anything recognized as effective for people (yet, more studies are probably needed) : https://www.phcogj.com/sites/default/files/PharmacognJ-13-1-206.pdf https://www.phcogj.com/sites/default/files/PharmacognJ-13-1-... In previous studies, it was found that the Akar Kuning (Arcangelisia flava Merr) contains chemical compounds, including saponins, flavonoids and tannins, besides that the roots also contain glycosides and alkaloids, especially the isokuinolin group, namely berberine, jatrorizin, and palmatin. There are also some minor alkaloids such as columbamine dehidrokoridalmin, homoaromolin and talifendin, and fibraleucin terpenes, and fibraurin has several activities such as antifungal, antiasma, antibacterial, anti-tumor, anti-malarial and anti- inflammatory.
- dudinax 2y agoOrangutans (probably) can't pass on "this will help you heal", but they might be able to pass on "Put this on a wound."
- dudeinjapan 2y agoIt was a prescription from Dr. Zaius https://youtu.be/JlmzUEQxOvA https://youtu.be/JlmzUEQxOvA
- rramadass 2y ago> Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do This is most probably the main reason. However there is some debate on whether these learned behaviours can be passed across generations. Here is David Attenborough showing Orangutans washing clothes/using soap/tools/etc. mimicking what they have seen Humans in their environment do - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFACrIx5SZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFACrIx5SZ0
- shmageggy 2y agoThis is an animal living in the wild who did not have contact with humans. The article mentions that he may have learned it from other orangutans, but says nothing about humans.
- rramadass 2y agoYeah, i read that but i don't think it tells the whole story. In Borneo they live in close quarters with Humans and often observe people (i.e. curiosity) from the forest's edge and may have picked up something via this way. They are very clever primates and hence could have picked up this behaviour in any number of ways. PS: Also checkout the Orangutan Jungle School video i link here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244125
- darth_avocado 2y agoObviously orangutans are much smarter as a species, they are know to pass down knowledge/behaviors, including tool usage, down generations. But there could be more to this behavior. A dog instinctively knows to eat grass when they have stomach issues and Alaskan Bears eat certain plants to expel parasites after hibernation. How do they know? Zoopharmacognosy is a fascinating subject that needs more research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoopharmacognosy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoopharmacognosy
- lsaferite 2y agoAnother one that I've been watching recently is chicks knowing to take dust baths with zero interaction with adult chickens. One reason for this behavior is apparently pest control.
- taneq 2y agoI find it interesting when people attribute abstract intentions to this kind of behaviour. The chick's probably not thinking "man I gotta dust myself for mites", it probably just feels good to get dusty. Now, the reason it feels good is probably that dust baths are correlated with fewer parasites and better overall outcomes, but I doubt the chick knows that. Same thing with cats liking scritches under their chin. They're not thinking "ah yes I am scent marking this human", scent glands are probably just itchy.
- lsaferite 2y agoSure, correlation like that is possibly a bit specious. On the topic of chicks and dust baths, it's quite interesting because as soon as they encounter dirt for the first time they all do the same things. If you've never seen it I recommend looking for a video. But it seems like a weird behavior to have in every chick I've hatched. TBH, I love seeing weird inherent behaviors emerge like that.
- ahartman00 2y agoCats can smell those scent markings though. They do also mark their territory in other ways. Our cats really do the rubbing thing during feeding, so i think they are trying to mark their territory, lol.
- frogpelt 2y agoDogs eat grass when they need to throw up.
- _yb2s 2y agoI don't think this is true- every dog I've had eats grass frequently and it doesn't usually cause them to throw up. Also- dogs can throw up on demand at any time, they don't need anything like grass to help them. This is because it is the natural way that female dogs bring home food for puppies, they vomit up the food to share it with them. I'm pretty sure dogs sometimes vomit on purpose with the explicit goal of sharing food with humans, and/or just to eat it again for fun out of boredom. When my dog is bored he will often start preparing to vomit, and if I tell him 'no', he will stop.
- andoando 2y agoMine too. Just munches on grass on every walk, never seen her throw up. I think she just likes it.
- _yb2s 2y agoI think humans have a hard time understanding animal behavior, and consistently underestimate their intelligence because we don’t understand or relate to their motivations and interests. We take our values and motivations as objective facts, and don’t even consider that maybe dogs enjoy eating grass, and also aren’t that interested in the weird sounds humans like to make with their mouths.
- below43 2y agoNot sure about the latter statement. Our dog is very interested in any keyword verbalised by us that may relate to receiving food or a walk or a ride in the car (from pretty much any corner of the house). She appears to be permanently listening to every sound we make.
- RoyalHenOil 2y ago
- xenospn 2y ago[flagged]
- datavirtue 2y agoLet's make sure that we ban that plant, immediately.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoBan catnip too.
- balls187 2y agoMany years ago I stopped by a zoo in France, with my 7mo son. I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller. I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood. The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure. Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.
- eellpp 2y agoAfter reading this, the choice of word "exhibit" hurts
- gonzo41 2y agoAnimal prison.
- bredren 2y agoZoos are are a terrible entertainment business. All the primates and megafauna especially, it is a tragedy. I'm certain they'll be looked back on with shame. Even as zoos market videos of animals "eating birthday cake" on social media. See also zoos' dark history entwined with ethnological expositions https://archive.is/xsuEU https://archive.is/xsuEU
- trogdor 2y agoI’m not sure that’s a fair statement to make categorically. Many zoos provide homes, food, and veterinary care for animals that would not be able to survive in the wild. For example, the mountain lion at Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is blind, and many of their other animals had been kept illegally by their previous owners, were confiscated by Arizona Game & Fish, and needed a place to live so they wouldn’t die.
- xvector 2y agoFactory farms will be looked back on with 10,000x more shame and horror than zoos. Zoos barely scratch the surface of the immense and unnecessary cruelty we inflict on animals. We torture 70 billion land animals to death every year and the poor things will never even understand why - they're just babies, mentally speaking. It's objectively the greatest evil humans have ever committed, and for our own pleasure at that. We inflict pure hellish suffering because "tAsTe bUdS gO BRRR!" It's hard to even comprehend something more comically, absurdly evil, both in terms of motive and sheer scale of suffering. At least zoos do trigger an empathy response and get people to care about animals more.
- cpeterso 2y agoOne of the most adorable TV shows I’ve seen is “Orangutan Jungle School” about the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation’s orangutan rescue/rehabilitation/release program. The series is available on a number of streaming services and many clips on YouTube. https://orangutanjungleschool.com/ https://orangutanjungleschool.com/
- rramadass 2y agoThis is THE classic Orangutan series to watch. I think some episodes (excerpts?) are available on Youtube Smithsonian Channel. Here is one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3hJgI2UrSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3hJgI2UrSg Anybody who watches these will come away with a deep appreciation of the Natural World, Darwinian Theory and how Human-like (even more than Chimpanzees/Gorillas) Orangutans are. After a while you forget that they are a different species and start laughing/crying/empathizing with these beautiful animals. Very highly recommended to watch with your kids and entire family.
- bifftastic 2y agoIs this actually new? See here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-16621-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-16621-w - discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669593 It's even been in Wild Kratts!
- swores 2y agoWhat's new is it's the first time an animal has been observed treating a wound with plants we know to be medically beneficial. It's not the first time we've seen animals use medically beneficial plants (orally before) and it's not the first time we've seen attempts to treat wounds (previous by placing insects on them, but we don't know if that was medically beneficial or pointless action).
- ricksunny 2y agoDid that self-administered plant-based treatment have an orangutan-FDA EUA authorization? What does the Cochrane study on wound-treatment with leaves say? Was there publication bias on successful trials of wound leaf treatment? Was the funnel plot of orangutan wound-leaf treatment studies asymmetric or symmetric? Was the relative risk less than 1? Is the orangutan p-hacking (were there 19 other orangutans who applied the same species leaf to their wound with no effect, and this orangutan kept them from the BBC's cameras)? If the orangutan was basing its experiment off animal-model studies of _homo sapiens_, how well should it expect those studies to carry over to Pongo pygmaeus? Did a supplement manufacturer fund the orangutan's trial? Wasn't it dangerous for the orangutan to self-administer based on some non-peer-reviewed preprint (s)he probably read online somewhere? Why were preprints allowed to be viewable by it, given the hazard of self-administering that viewing posed? The orangutan should have left its wound untreated until it, its peers, all the orangutan organizations offering standard-of-care wound treatments, and their regulators had completed analyzing all the results of all the independent clinical trials in one comprehensive meta-study. (If there had been any clinical trials undertaken while the meta study was being analyzed, then make that two comprehensive meta-studies, and hope they don't result in a tie. If the leaf treatment worked, we wouldn't be calling it a leaf, we would call it medicine. Pssh total pseudoscientist orangutan stuck in some institution-distrusting online subculture bubble.
- rspoerri 2y agoI like the childrens scale next to the leaves in a scientic article :-)
- forinti 2y agoIn the South of Brazil, Howler monkeys have been found to chew a plant and put it in wounds. The plant was then analysed and it really has healing properties.
- codethief 2y agoI know I'm humanizing Rakus here but I'd like to think that, when he kisses the tree towards the end of the video, he does so out of gratitude for helping him. :-)
- luxpir 2y agoI like the idea, but he likes the ants more :)
- tambourine_man 2y agoProbably eating some crawling ants, but it's a nice thought
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- Intralexical 2y agoApparently orangutans do kiss to show affection. And the lips are probably full of nerve endings for foraging purposes anyway. So who knows, maybe he was actually kissing that tree to show some kind of positive emotion, whether it's a kind of reciprocal appreciation similar to what we'd consider "gratitude" for helping him, something associative on a simpler level for making him feel better, or maybe a different, uniquely orangutan emotion that we don't have the words for. > I know I'm humanizing Rakus here Out of all the species on this planet, orangutans probably have some of the emotions that are the closest to human emotions. Like, would you expect Ancient Greeks to have emotional experiences that are recognisable to you? What about Cro-Magnons? Neanderthals? Australopithecines? Where do they stop being people with rich inner lives, and turn into animals driven by instinct? Orangutans are tree-dwelling (semi)social fruit eaters, like we were not that long ago. If you set the Tree of Life to "Zoom to Fit", we'd blend right together. "Humanizing" would be if you were talking about an octopus, a fish, or a protozoan. Different humans at different extremes already experience emotions in vastly different ways; I don't think it's unthinkable or odd that the median individual in such a closely related species might have experiences which we can relate to. But also he looked to me like he was chewing in the last couple seconds, so maybe the other commenter saying he was just eating ants was right lol.
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- mattlondon 2y agoIt would be nice if they could work out what this "medicinal" tree is and start mass-producing this paste because that looks like some serious healing going on there! ... or perhaps orangutans are just way better at this sort of thing that human are? I recently tripped up running and had a much smaller cut (compared to the apparent missing-chunk-of-flesh this orangutan had) on my knee that took several weeks to fully heal. I'd pay for this paste!
- codethief 2y ago> on my knee Wounds on/near joints are known to heal much more slowly because of the added movement-induced stress. In contrast, facial wounds heal particularly fast¹. For instance, I had a bike accident last September, which resulted in a small wound on my knee and several bigger, more severe injuries in my face. (I basically did a face plant.) The facial injuries healed within 2 weeks. Meanwhile, to this day people ask me what's wrong with my knee because while the wound has closed, I have severe scar tissue and it still looks like the accident had occurred only a few days ago. ¹) Not sure whether it's true but I read somewhere that this might have been selected for during evolution, since the face plays such a crucial role in communication.
- borski 2y agohehe... face... plant... (sorry)
- observationist 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibraurea_tinctoria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibraurea_tinctoria There are all sorts of beneficial chemicals in nature, way more than we've accurately assessed and documented. Because plants can't be patented, they're left largely unknown - the incentives that might bring access to things like this are almost entirely missing from the modern Western market.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoWild plants themselves can’t be patented, but chemicals derived from plants can be, provided they are non-obvious and have utility. Novel plants like GMOs can also be patented.
- datadeft 2y agoEven the animals know that plants are medicine. Such a wierd thing that lebel these as alternative.
- monetus 2y agoMy uninformed opinion is that anything which hasn't been distilled into a single compound won't be called medicine by the medical industry. How they manage to study those that are only beneficial when converging with other compounds, I have no idea.
- greenish_shores 2y agoI have some background in pharmacology, particularly psychopharmacology and I can tell you that it's not even remotely true. There's so much studies out there... so, what kind of studies were you reading? For example - Rapamycin/sirolimus, ephedrine, morphine, antibiotics (e.g. penicillins, cephalosporins), psilocin and psilocybin, are the first naturally occuring (in significant quantities) that came to my mind when thinking about some. Neither of these were studied only in any combination drugs (FDCs). And a lot of close derivatives of naturally occuring substances, like aspirin. This could be really a huge list (of both).
- F-Lexx 2y agoHow about referencing (with links) a bunch of concrete relevant studies from psychopharmacology then, to back up your claims?
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- gwbas1c 2y agoThis is a casual message board; there's no requirement to put that kind of effort into a post here. You can also do the legwork yourself.
- rdevsrex 2y agoThat's pretty cool! Perhaps genetic or innate memory is how he knew what to do? Sort of like dogs eating grass when they are sick?
- logtempo 2y agoMonkey see, monkey do, and orangutan think and understand. orangutan are quite smart and can associate ideas, communicate and share knowledge. They are considered as one of the most intelligent primate. A shame they're critically endangered.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoNaked ape see forest ape as competition, naked ape destroy competition.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago100% genetic
- dh-g 2y ago67% incorrect
- mock-possum 2y ago> Dr Laumer says it is possible that it was the first time Rakus had done this type of treatment. “It could be that he accidentally touched his wound with his finger that had the plant on it. And then because the plant has quite potent pain relieving substances he might have felt immediate pain relief, which made him apply it again and again," she says.
- anon291 2y agoIt seems odd to me the go to would be 'genetic' memory, when mammals pretty much universally engage in learning and cultural sharing. I'm not sure about where these orangutans live, but my guess would be that, if it is not a thing the orangutans knew, centuries of living alongside humans... they probably picked up a thing or two. They're quite smart creatures.