Dr. Ape Will See You Now

HUMANS AREN’T THE ONLY  PRIMATES THAT USE MEDICATION.

- by Sarah Gottlieb

Thirteen-year-old Sia needs a break. It seems he’s just been in a food fight—not the fun, silly school cafeteria kind but a serious one that resulted in a painful cut on his foot. He and his mom, Suzee, decide to rest, while his energetic toddler sister, Sassandra, romps around. As he lies back on the rainforest floor, he props his foot on a fallen branch.

In a flash, Suzee’s long arm swings overhead, snatches an insect from the underside of a leaf and places it between her lips. Taking the leftover mushy paste from her mouth, she applies it gently to Sia’s cut foot. Sassandra stops her playing and barrels over inquisitively, as does a mother holding a baby. All of them are chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees’ First Aid

Filming all of this from a distance was Alessandra Mascaro. She says, “At first, I was not sure of what was going on, but, when I saw that other individuals came to observe, I realized that surely must have been something interesting.” Now a PhD student at Osnabrück University in Germany, Mascaro was working at the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project in the Loango National Park in Gabon. That’s a country on the west coast of Africa famous for its surfing hippopotamuses. Watching the footage closely, Mascaro suspected that she’d filmed the first evidence of chimpanzees medicating with insects.