Chimps learn about nature's medicine chest from elders

CHIMPANZEES may learn from their elders to recognise plants with medicinal properties. But as with all evidence that primates self-medicate, the finding is controversial.

For 11 months, Shelly Masi of France's National Museum of Natural History in Paris and colleagues monitored 44 wild chimps in Uganda, noting whenever they ate medically useful plants. Whenever older chimps did so, Masi's team found that younger chimps paid more attention than usual (Physiology & Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2011.08.012).

The researchers speculate that the chimps may learn from elders to eat the plants for medicinal purposes, although they never directly observed any cases of ill animals "treating" themselves. "Wild apes seldom show disease symptoms, so observations associating illness and a feeding choice may be rare," says Masi.

The team also monitored western gorillas in the Central African Republic, but found they paid less attention to elders when it came to medicinal foods. Gorillas eat more vegetation than chimps, so may take in medicines by default rather than by design, they say.

Michael Huffman at the University of Kyoto in Japan, who studies self-medication in Africa's great apes, is not convinced by the new claims for how chimps learn the skill. "But their ideas are out there now, and it's up to the scientific process to replicate or refine them."

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