ELODIE FREYMANN

When you’re feeling sick, it probably doesn’t occur to you to try eating tree bark.

- Ben Silver

But that’s precisely what some chimpanzees may do. You might already know that chimpanzees share plenty of similarities with humans: They play, they fight, they form communities. But did you know that they also use medicine?

Elodie Freymann is a primatologist who studies how chimpanzees self-medicate with plants. While pursuing her PhD at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, she spent several months working at the Budongo Conservation Field Station, living in the middle of the Budongo Forest in Uganda. While there, she observed wild chimpanzees up close to learn more about how they interact with the plants in their environment.

Freymann is also an artist who uses nature drawing to help her deepen her understanding of her observations.

HOW DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN STUDYING PRIMATES?

From a young age, I’ve been really interested in primates. I was inspired as a young girl by the work of Jane Goodall, and I had this fantasy of bushwhacking through the jungle and following apes around.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO WORK IN A FIELD STATION?

When you work in a chimpanzee field station, you wake up at the crack of dawn. You pack your supplies for the day: a camcorder, a notebook, and binoculars. I also packed test tubes and pipettes to collect feces samples so we could test the chimps’ health. You then meet up with a field primatologist and go into the forest with them. Field primatologists at our field station are local Ugandans, many of whom have been working full time at the field station for decades. They are, with no doubt, the unsung heroes of primatology.

HOW DO PRIMATOLOGISTS STUDY CHIMPANZEES?