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Nature is full of substances and materials with the potential to treat illness and injury.
And humans aren’t the only ones who have figured that out.
Many animals exhibit behaviors that are thought to involve
using a natural product to cause some desired effect.
It can be tough to determine exactly why an animal is doing something though.
So we look for them eating or outwardly applying some material
to increase their chance of survival,
but only when they have a specific problem
For example, lizards eat roots that appear to counteract snake venom,
and fruit flies may lay their eggs in certain plants to protect their babies from wasps.
Still, our inferences are always circumstantial.
But things got more interesting this week when
a German research team announced that they’ve observed
a new form of self-medication in wild chimpanzees in Gabon.
That alone isn’t surprising – it’s how the chimps do it that’s new.
Researchers observed chimps catching insects and putting them on open wounds.
Over a fifteen-month period, the scientists documented 22 instances
of the chimps putting insects on a wound,
and most of them played out exactly the same way.
The ape would catch a flying insect, immobilize it by squeezing it between their lips,
place it on a wound and move it around, then fish it out of the wound.
The researchers think doing this might have an anti-inflammatory or antiseptic benefit.
In three of the observations, though, the researchers saw something special.
The chimpanzees were applying insects to another chimp’s wounds.
And not just to their kids or siblings, but to totally unrelated members of the group.
In one case, three other chimpanzees helped out.
It’s worth noting that the researchers don’t yet know what beneficial properties
these insects might have, or even what kinds of insects were used.
I guess it’s hard to get close enough to see what kind of bug an ape
is catching without like bothering the ape.
It’s possible that it’s more of a cultural practice specific to this group of chimps
than something with a specific biological benefit,
though that would still be super interesting for the researchers
studying their social dynamics.
If no other chimp groups display this behavior, that would be a clue.
Medicating other individuals seems to be an example of a prosocial behavior,
or action that benefits another individual.
Humans engage in prosocial behaviors out of empathy and concern for others,
but there’s a lot of debate over whether other species
are prosocial for the same reason.
In this case, helping an unrelated individual with wound care
doesn’t seem like it provides much benefit to the helper,
so it might be a great tool to help scientists learn more about what drives
members of non-human species to help each other out.
The researchers plan to study the social aspects of insect wound treatment,
looking at who gives and receives treatment, how new chimps
learn to use insects on wounds in the first place,
and whether the bugs have any pharmaceutical benefit.
That could tell us a lot about prosocial behavior in chimpanzees,
and even about the evolution and drivers of prosocial behavior in general.
But now, we turn to a community of animals with substantially fewer brains.
A paper published this week in Nature Communications
looked into how communities of sea sponges in the central Arctic Ocean survive.
Sponges often live in really dense groups called sponge grounds.
And because sponges are filter feeders, these sponge grounds
tend to crop up in areas with a lot of carbon in the water,
because more carbon means more of the organic material that the sponges eat.
The sponge ground on the Langseth Ridge in the Central Arctic Ocean
is about 330 kilometers south of the North Pole.
It is the densest and most northerly sponge ground ever discovered.
And researchers were scratching their heads about how it could be there at all.
It’s usually covered in sea ice, and algae in the sea ice don’t produce much carbon.
Not enough to support a huge sponge community.
The sponges live on underwater mountains formed by volcanoes,
which sometimes release things like methane,
but these mountains are totally inactive.
So scientists had no idea what they were actually eating.
So they measured the amount of carbon and nitrogen in the sponges
and compared them to possible food sources.
They combined that information with seafloor mapping
to get a better sense of how the area could provide for so many sponges.
And They found that under the sponges,
the mountain peaks were covered in tubes left behind by tube worms.
Which would track, because those worms tend to live in places where gasses
like methane seep out – but again,
the mountains aren’t active, and the worms are not alive.
Any more, that is.
The carbon and nitrogen samples of sponge tissue actually matched samples of the tubes,
which suggests that that is where they’re getting those elements.
From dead tube worms.
The sponges are sustaining themselves on a completely extinct ecosystem.
An ecosystem of methane seeps and tube worms
that had been extinct for thousands of years.
Sponges are hugely important to underwater ecosystems,
because they provide places for other species to live.
They also filter water, which affects the availability of nutrients
and other particles cycling in the water.
And the scientists think that’s what’s happening in the Langseth Ridge.
Microscopic sponge parts mix with the empty worm tubes to form a dense mat across the mountain top.
That mat, and the sponges themselves, provide a home to a bunch of microbes.
The microbes chow down on the old tubes
and break the nutrients in them down into tiny pieces that dissolve in the water.
Then the sponges filter the water and get all that good stuff.
As bizarre as this ecosystem is, it’s important to understand how it works.
The sea-ice in the area is rapidly melting
and that change is going to be a big shock
to all of the critters that have made a home there for thousands of years.
And conservationists can’t protect ecosystems
if they don’t understand how they work.
So hopefully learning how sponges survive
and thrive on an extinct ecosystem might actually keep
the new ecosystem from going extinct too.
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