Paging Dr Chimp: the medical secrets we can learn from apes, birds and even butterflies | Animal behaviour

IThe city of Mexico, home birds, and home mint picks up cigarettes and weaving individual fibers in the lining of their nests. When researchers discovered for the first time after – while studying what ends in nests – assume it is just a thin material used as insulation. But through a series of genius tests, they discovered that the heels were actually medical: birds were actively gathered because nicotine tuccin reduces mites and other parasites filled with blood. Birds treat themselves – and their offspring.

It is one of the many great examples of animals that have been revealed in Doctors in natureA new book for the United States, Dutch academic book, Jaap De Roode. Monkeys deliberately swallow the leaves to extinguish intestinal worms. Caterpillars Switching Diets to repel parasite flies. Bees are sticky resins in their homes to combat the disease.

Our medical skills were once a major difference between humans and other animals. “In Western society, we love to be unique,” says De Rudd, speaking from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was a professor of biology at Emory University. “We have reached all kinds of characteristics – they are tools, they walk erect, they are great brains, it is a language, culture, it is a drug. All of those things we expose, one by one – and discover that we are just another animal.

In fact, de Rudd notes, our knowledge of medicine may have begun as a simulation – by monitoring and copying animal teachers. Today, a greater understanding of how other animals can help natural medications in turn to find new treatments for human diseases, as well as maintain the health of livestock and more productive.

Birds and waste in Mexico City are the preferred de Rudd because they adapted very quickly to a human environment. “Instead of collecting plants like a lot of wild birds, fins and blindfolds found an acronym and went to the heels of cigarettes full of their nests, and they maintain these ponds in the blood such as lice and stand.

De Rudd started his studies with a similar discovery in Butterfly monarch. These large orange butterflies are famous for their epic wounds between Mexico and North America, but they are in one -cell students called Ophryocystis Elektroscirrara (OE). Millions of black parasitic germs are formed on its skin, causing weight loss and dryness. Many butterflies die on their migrations.

Through a series of experiments, de roode discovered that the kings larvae take a toxic category of chemicals called cardinolids in vegetable milk herbs. A variety of tropical milk contains more cardinolids than its sister herbs in the milk swamp, and the tests found that 20 % less larvae that ate orbital milk was affected by OE. More studies have revealed that OE’s female butterflies laid more eggs on medical tropical milk more than non -medicinal plants. De Rudd believes that they are trying to protect their children by doing this.

“When you think about how to work and natural selection, there are many things that parents do for their offspring – it may not be strange,” says De Rudd. As he writes in the book: “Animals with smaller brains can be the same amount of medications like those who have brains like us.”

All medicine begins with plants and fungi. Most plants cannot move, and therefore you need to produce chemicals that defend them from the attack. Cocaine, for example, is a substance spread by Coca plants to repel hungry insects by mobilizing their nerve devices and causing tremors and death. “Plants and fungi provide a wide pharmacy that humans and animals can use to find medicines to fight parasites and pathogens,” he writes de Road.

He was one of the first well -known human paramedics Outzi SnowmanWhose 5300 -year -old body was discovered in the Alps in 1991. His intestine contained a parasitic worm eggs, carrying two cork -shaped bodies Polypore fungiIt is well known that it has antibiotic and boring effects, indicating that the Neolithic man was treating his enemies. Since then, it has been discovered that primitive humans have been using medicine 50,000 years ago.

The first humans may have discovered their medical discoveries by following examples of other animals. The modern scientific field of animal drugs began in the 1980s when alternative scientist Michael Hoffmann and Mohamedy Seifu Kalondi, two national goalkeeper Tanzania, Shampanzi, Chosiko, were ill. Chausiku stopped at Hoffman’s shrubs that chimpans did not see before and chewed on a branch. Calondi Hoffman told the locals that used the leaves of the plant and the bitter paper, as a traditional drug that treats stomach disorders, diarrhea and intestinal parasites.

Continue to follow Chausiku, who built herself and rested. The next day to eat it in a bitter fiber, surprisingly, she got up and was jumping with her daughter again. Hoffman took vegetable samples again to his university and found that it contains a group of chemicals known for its medical value against parasitic worms, bacteria and even cancerous tumors.

Hoffman’s additional studies on other individual chimpanzees have proven that they were using this plant – and others – deliberately for medicine. Scientists such as Michael Singer, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Weslian, also notes that one of the medical definitions is that it comes at a cost: medications have side effects, and this bitter paper was unpleasant. Since then, alternative doctors have found that 25 different types of wild wild in 26 countries have used plants with well described medicinal properties.

Domesticated animals are still smart enough to possess what scientists call “nutritional wisdom”: they listen to their intestines. The cattle afflicted with worms is looking for rich tannils, which, when consumed, can kill worms. In another revealing experience, two groups of calves were given different foods. One was given a ready part of pills and straw. The other was allowed to choose from the same food buffet. In fact, you eat the buffet calves less than a weight less than weight, such as calves that have given ready servings. So the cost of Kilo production of beef decreased by 20 % when the animals were chosen. In the wild, free routes may eat up to 50 species of plants per day. It is not difficult to see health benefits (and productivity) if livestock is given more natural management-in cows, and a more diverse diet, and perfectly, outdoor grazing in plant-rich pastures with hedges, instead of weapons. For example, Rosamund Young’s organic farmer noticed it, if it is sick, Free cows Look for willful bark or buds, which is the source of salicylic acid, a chemical compound that has been changed by chemists to produce aspirin.

DE ROOUWE finds similar lessons with honey bees, which seems to be increasingly infected by the murderous mites and other pathogens. Probolis-a substance similar to the glue it collects from plants-uses to receive things together, smooth surfaces and fill cracks. Beekeepers, over time, enjoy the choice of bees that are not produced by the same vocabulary, because it is so sticking to it becomes a source of inconvenience to them. However, this was a bad step.

Humans have been used as a drug as a drug for thousands of years (recently Against HIVIt is not surprising, it is published by bee colonies to protect themselves from pathogens. Experiments before Marla Spavak from the University of Minnesota and Michael Simon Fairum I found that the bee colonies with fungi that sent more bees to collect the cells for their cells. When beehives were injured before ChaalkbraoodIt is a disease that affects honeybees larvae, adult bees merged more of this medical resin into their nests.

Modern bee cells with smooth wooden interiors have led to the production of supplies, but de Rudd explains the simplicity of experimental adjustments in the cell design in the United States encouraging honey bee to produce more of them again. Using coarse wood instead of incontinence, adding inner grooves to wood, the bees encourage the production of more vocations, which leads to larger and healthier colonies.

“Humans have used propolis as long as health supplements, but they did not make the link that may help bees. This stems from the idea that we are the only ones who know medicine.”

He hopes to challenge his book this wrong feeling of excellence. It is also a strong message to stop the extinction crisis. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the chimpanzee and bonobos research group follows and extracts chemicals from the plants they use. “We need all types of creative ways to find new drugs, especially with all antibiotic resistance,” says De Rudd.

The destruction of biological diversity means losing not only plants and fungi with valuable future medicinal uses, but also losing our teachers. “For all kinds of missing plants, we lose another potential drug due to a disease or infectious cancer. For every lost animal, we lose another pharmacy or a possible doctor,” says De Rudd. “You can protect nature because you think it’s the right thing to do. Or you can do this because it also helps us, and these things gather.”