Watch this mama chimp treat her son’s open wound by applying insect “poultice”

A chimp named Suzee inspects a wound on the foot of her adolescent son, Sia, then catches an insect out of the air, puts it in her mouth, presses it between her lips, and applies it to the wound while her daughter, Sassandra, observes her. (Alessandra Mascaro)

In November 2019, Alessandra Mascaro was observing a community of chimpanzees in the Loango National Park in Gabon as part of her volunteer service with the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project when she noticed some unusual behavior. A chimp named Suzee was inspecting a wound on the foot of her son, Sia. Suzee suddenly caught an insect from a nearby leaf, put it into her mouth for a moment, and then pressed it to Sia's wound.

Mascaro caught the unusual interaction on video and forwarded it to two scientists on the project: Tobias Deschner, a primatologist with the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project, and Simone Pika, a cognitive biologist at Osnabrück University. The researchers thought the interaction could be suggestive of prosocial behavior among chimpanzees and the capacity for empathy—a question of heated debate in the field—and they spent the next 15 months looking for other examples of this type of wound-treating behavior. All told, they recorded 76 such instances and reported their findings in a new correspondence published in the journal Current Biology.

There are between 42 and 45 chimps in the Loango National Park community. According to the authors, the males are much more prone to open wounds than females (with a ratio of 63:13) since they tend to have more aggressive interactions. The wound-treating incidents (both self-applied and applying insects to the wounds of others) were filmed whenever possible, and that footage was transcribed into detailed written reports. In some cases, there was no video footage, so the researchers wrote a detailed report the same day it occurred.

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