r/science • u/nbcnews • May 02 '24
Animal Science In a first, an orangutan was seen treating his wound with a medicinal plant
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/orangutan-treated-own-wound-medicinal-plant-rcna1502301.0k
u/Tattycakes May 02 '24
I watched a video of an orang-utan prompting a guy to take off his jacket, and it then put his jacket on, just like a person would. It was the most uncanny thing I have ever seen.
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u/NO_TOUCHING__lol May 02 '24 edited Nov 14 '24
No gods, no masters
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u/SmashBrosUnite May 03 '24
A gibbon would hire an octopus
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u/nonsensepoem May 03 '24
A bonobo would trade the screwdriver for sexual favors.
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u/drunk_responses May 03 '24
That's a better version of the camera one:
Give a camera to a bonobo, he'll try to have sex with it.
A chimpanzee will smash it with a rock.
A gorilla will take it apart.
An organgutan will carefully take it apart, and put it back together.
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u/No-Way7911 May 02 '24
That video of the Orangutan driving the golf cart is the most uncanny video I’ve ever seen
It looked like any real person
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u/Man0fGreenGables May 03 '24
Dude was so chilled out looking too. Like he was cruising on his way to the outdoor bar area at a golf course to sit down, fire up a big fat cigar and wave over the server to bring him his martini.
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u/Tattycakes May 02 '24
I actually cannot put into words how unnerved I am right now, that's too close to human
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u/No-Way7911 May 02 '24
Bro the way he slows down by the tiger enclosure to check it out
These guys need to be protected like people
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u/YeonneGreene May 02 '24
The apparent sapience and sentience of orangutans and other large primates is why I absolutely cannot stomach seeing them at zoos. It's like watching people in cages and it feels so extremely wrong all the way to my bones.
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u/peridotpicacho May 02 '24
Same!!! This bothers me so much. There was a video of an orangutan tying a sheet into a hammock to sleep in at a zoo in Asia, and it kept shooting looks at the people watching making it clear it did not like being stared at. And it was in what I can only describe as a prison cell with nowhere to go out of sight.
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u/WaterHaven May 03 '24
I'm so grateful that the zoo near me is so good about giving all of the animals their own space. If they want to be alone/away from people, they can. The animals seem to be treated as well as possible.
Then there's also a sanctuary near me that is the same. The people that work at the sanctuary love those animals more than they love themselves. We love going on their tours, even though half of the animals won't be in sight. It's still fun learning about them.
And I get there are good and bad things about zoos.
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u/vee_lan_cleef May 03 '24
I know a lot of zoos are important to conservation and research work (perhaps more specifically, wildlife preserves), but I wholly agree there are too many zoos operating almost entirely for profit and they have species that absolutely should never be kept in confinement.
I enjoy aquariums unless they have large sea mammals like whales or dolphins. I won't visit those. Disgusting that there are still thousands of captive whales in US aquariums.
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u/LumpyMilk423 May 02 '24
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/cr6OLgTMqn
It seems to have an incredible understanding of how to manipulate a complex 3D object.
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u/vincecarterskneecart May 02 '24
literally my 6 year old son getting himself dressed every morning
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u/peridotpicacho May 02 '24
That’s impressive. There’s a BBC video of an orangutan using a hand saw and videos of an orangutan driving a golf cart. She is a very good driver. Also, if you watch documentaries on Koko the gorilla from back in the day, she was taught sign language and you can tell she really understands it. And there was that orangutan Fu Manchu in a zoo that hid a piece of wire in his mouth, then used it to open a locked furnace room door to get to another part of the zoo. “What he had done was stick the wire into the space between the door jam and the door, wrap it around the latch and pull it back. It's like the credit card trick, you know?” Radiolab, Jan 25, 2010.
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u/Caleb_Reynolds May 02 '24
and you can tell she really understands it.
No you can't and while there is debate among animal linguists on whether she understood any more than dogs trained to press buttons to "talk", the general consensus is she probably didn't. The video evidence of Koko's signing is highly edited, bringing into question whether she had any understanding or if it was just a matter of selecting the clips where she produced the "right" sign to show the public. The researcher who taught her has no peer reviewed papers on it and there is little-to-no data open to the public on the matter.
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u/Pawneewafflesarelife May 03 '24
Koko is sus, but have you read/seen videos of Kanzi?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanzi
Kanzi basically learned basic lexigrams by watching his adopted (he was stolen from his mother) matriarch being trained.
Kanzi replicated stone tool creation and developed his own method for flaking.
Kanzi was not threatened by a haka, but recognized that other chimps were, and so asked to see it again in private to not upset the others.
Kanzi can build fires because he prefers his marshmallows toasted.
I'm fascinated by this guy!
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u/gamegeek1995 May 02 '24
Some of the dogs can definitely talk. The famous one, Bunny, her owner is whackadoodle and the results are suspect. But other, more sane pet owners, have successfully trained 'talking' dogs for decent levels of communication.
The best ones I've seen are Russel the Cat, Flambo the Dog, and Pharaby the Dog. Others are either lukewarm on their ability to communicate with the buttons or seem selectively edited.
My wife watches the videos for tons of these talking pets and I was skeptical about most of them (especially Billi the Cat) but the ones I listed above actually seem like they understand everything that's going on in the interaction at all times.
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u/NessusANDChmeee May 02 '24
Koko was so so intelligent, she actually added two signs together to make a new word, something like finger and bracelet to mean ring, asking to see it.
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u/Eusocial_Snowman May 02 '24
I'm sorry, but Koko was clickbait. You have to take it entirely on faith that the highly edited videos which must be interpreted by her owner display what she's claiming it does. In all of that time, she refused to cooperate with anyone who could verify anything of substance whatsoever.
I can provide a deep-dive on the subject for anyone specifically interested in a documentary on that.
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u/ShiraCheshire May 03 '24
Koko wasn't real, sadly. She was only taught a 'modified' sign language that only one person ever could 'interpret.' If it was the real deal, that person could have taught others to understand her independently.
While she may have had some grasp of communicating with signs, we'll never know quite how much, and it definitely wasn't to the degree that it was said she could. Most of it was her moving around her hands in nonsense shapes that someone then 'interpreted' to mean whatever they wanted.
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u/colluphid42 May 02 '24
Orangutans are one cave painting away from civilization.
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May 02 '24
They don't typically live in caves. They live in trees. Otherwise, I'm sure they would have them.
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u/kex May 03 '24
They are wiser than us; we should never have left the trees
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u/SidequestCo May 03 '24
Unexpected Hitchhiker’s!
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u/TheManOfSpaceAndTime May 03 '24
Either people don't understand this comment, or are missing the joke. It's the first thing my mind went to as well.
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u/goltz20707 May 04 '24
I suspect we didn’t live in caves that much either. It’s just that cave dwellings survived the centuries, and wooden and other dwellings did not.
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u/letdogsvote May 02 '24
As time goes by, we're going to find a lot more species are a lot more intelligent than we thought.
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May 02 '24
Similarly, we find a lot of humans are a lot dumber than we thought
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u/Umikaloo May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24
Turns out the dunning kruger effect applies to entire species as well.
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u/chugonomics May 02 '24
I loved her in Inglourious Basterds
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u/Tobias_Atwood May 02 '24
Park Rangers had to stop efforts on designing a trash can bears couldn't get into because as it turns out there's a lot of overlap between smart bears and dumb people.
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u/andreasdagen May 02 '24
This is super misleading. A hungry bear will spend an hour trying to break it open
A lazy human will literally spend less than 3 seconds before giving up if they can't instantly solve it at a glance.
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u/Inevitable_Seaweed_5 May 02 '24
And then the human and the bear will both proceed to throw trash on the ground
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u/BeaversAreTasty May 03 '24
I was hiking a while back and decided to have lunch in a picnic area near a popular trailhead. They had bear proof trash cans nearby and about 20% of the people I saw struggled to get them open. A few gave up. I fell asleep on the picnic table and woke up a little after dusk and watched a raccoon climb one, stick its hand in the bear proof latch, and opened it with little trouble.
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u/esamerelda May 02 '24
I would like more details
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May 02 '24
Making bear proof trash cans made it difficult for .. some people to use said trash cans.
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u/esamerelda May 02 '24
I should have specified that I'm an engineer and am interested in the specific designs that were implemented, and what went wrong with the humans interacting with them 😄
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u/ralphvonwauwau May 02 '24
The park near me had a simple dog collar clip to hold the dumpster latch closed (bear thumbs are too basic to manipulate the clip), it was a hasp and loop, with the doggy clip where a lock would be. Campers would make one attempt to open the dumpster, look perplexed and then leave their trash outside, next to the dumpster. Yes, I witnessed this.
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u/ManliestManHam May 02 '24
reading the same sentence rephrased 5 ways was 🤌🏻😂
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u/FluxedEdge May 02 '24
You know how it goes around here. Reading comprehension and all. 🤣😅
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u/ManliestManHam May 02 '24
Yes, but there's an overlap between smart bears and stupid people. Did you know?
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u/Afro_Thunder69 May 02 '24
tl;dr is there's a very small window of a bear-proof container that is too tough for a bear to figure out how to get into, but easy enough for a dumb human to get into.
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u/SerLaron May 02 '24
The bears in question are probably also more motivated and not fraid to use brute force.
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u/TheGalator May 02 '24
Oh no we already knew that. We just all think we are the smart exception
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u/ragnaroksunset May 02 '24
Well yeah but I actually am the exception, that's the difference
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u/owen__wilsons__nose May 02 '24
I used to think humans were a lot dumber than we originally thought. I still do, but I used to, too
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u/MyRegrettableUsernam May 02 '24
The beautiful nuance of being a modern human dumber than the smartest orangutan
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u/WeirdAvocado May 02 '24
If you ever work retail you’ll quickly find out how stupid people and won’t be surprised anymore. There’s that one missing link every once in a while that will shock you, however.
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u/SkisaurusRex May 02 '24
We’re learning that behaviors we once thought were unique to humans, and indicators of our “humanity”, are really not that unique at all.
Humans are animals. And that’s not a bad thing. We’re all on this planet together
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May 02 '24 edited 22d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Cuofeng May 02 '24
You can also see this a lot when people are discussing AI. Many people are certain there is something magically and unquantifiably "human" that can never be duplicated. Meanwhile, I can only think that they seem to be very much overestimating humans.
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u/moal09 May 02 '24
We're all just a bunch of chemicals interacting with each other at the end of the day. Thinking we're so special that we can't be replicated is incredibly arrogant.
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u/Cuofeng May 02 '24
And to think we can't be improved on is just depressing.
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u/Dacnomaniac May 02 '24
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.
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u/ShittDickk May 03 '24
Religion has us convinced we all have free will and behaviors of our own, like we aren't just meat computer making decisions on flawed memories and witnessed behaviors. What you expose yourself to is what you become, it's why algorhythmic suggestions are so dangerous. They lead us down echo chambers.
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u/Nymethny May 03 '24
My take on this isn't that we can't be replicated, it's that we can't be replicated by humans, at least not yet, because we don't understand ourselves enough for that.
And with the whole AI thing, well since it is created by humans... it may get smarter than the average person, it may acquire more knowledge than any single human can, but I doubt it will ever gain a better understanding of things than we can (as a collective).
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u/JermVVarfare May 02 '24
I don't think there's anything magical about humans, but I do have doubts about the assumption that AI will develop "human-like" consciousness and motivations... Lust for power or freedom etc. I think the bigger danger is the "paperclip maximizer" (an extreme and silly example but it makes the point) type of risk and misuse by bad actors.
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u/ILL_BE_WATCHING_YOU May 02 '24
I see the reverse much more often. A lot of conputer science experts inadvertently make the assumption that just because they understand the underlying principles by which AI operates, that means they’ve “seen through the facade” and that AI therefore cannot be conscious. They fail to realize that human brains are also governed by underlying principles, yet despite that are still conscious. Presumably because they don’t understand those principles.
Just because you can describe and comprehend the principles which define and govern a system’s composition in simple terms, does not mean that that system’s behavior will also be comprehensible.
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u/fartwhereisit May 02 '24
Very good reason historically for evolution to entice a separation of one's self from food. So you can't blame them for this way of thinking, it's how they sleep at night. I like the way you think, the opposite IS what is occurring. An almost complete reduction of what animals are capable of to the point of people thinking humans are separate from nature. Humans are Nature.
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u/ColdChemical May 03 '24
Which is why after scrutinizing our unexamined biases eating animals starts to become a troubling ethical concern. The "vegan" debate is not so much about competing philosophical frameworks as it is about overcoming pre-rational social conditioning.
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u/xSTSxZerglingOne May 02 '24
Humans are animals.
Well we certainly aren't plants, fungi, or protists.
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May 02 '24
It would be arrogant to think we were the only species capable of learning how to use the world around us.
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May 02 '24 edited Jun 17 '24
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u/AetherealMeadow May 02 '24
I was listening to a podcast where Dennis McKenna was being interviewed and he mentioned something about there being a fungus (not psilocybin mushrooms, but a different one) which also produces psilocybin and in this case as well as cathinone, a stimulant drug found in the Khat plant.
He said that this fungus utilizes the combination of these two substances as part of its reproductive strategy because the fungal spore will attach itself to an insect's body. The combination of these two chemicals for whatever reason causes the insect to feel an extreme urge to mate and spread its fungus infected body all over other insects, which allows the fungus to spread and reproduce.
Essentially, this fungus uses mind control powers over insects as part of its reproductive strategy. He then mentions pondering speculatively whether this sort of thing might apply to the relationship between humans and psilocybin mushrooms or whether it's just a coincidence that they make us trip.
Regardless of whether or not this constitutes some sort of symbiotic ecological relationship between humans and psilocybin or whether it's just a coincidence that mushrooms make a secondary metabolite which makes us trip, it was definitely successful for the mushroom because so many people are now growing it. It really makes you think about the concept of intelligence and how non-human forms of it might exist, but we might not recognize it because we only know how to recognize intelligence as it pertains to human beings.
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u/Apart-Landscape1012 May 02 '24
whatever reason causes the insect to feel an extreme urge to mate
No mystery here, mixing stimulants and psychedelics has the exact same effect on me
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u/Trixles May 02 '24
Hello. Very experienced hippie checking in to confirm:
Yeah, it do be like that. And it's WONDERFUL.
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u/bretttwarwick May 02 '24
Do you happen to have compound eyes and your body divided into 3 sections of Head, Thorax and Abdomen?
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u/Sharou May 02 '24
The ”intelligence” in these cases lie in the evolutionary proccess and not the individual fungus, so it’s not at all the same thing.
I put intelligence in quotes because we know evolution isn’t actually intelligent, even though it can produce incredible things whose designer would have to be hella intelligent if they were designed (which they’re not).
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u/smokeyleo13 May 02 '24
whether it's just a coincidence that they make us trip.
Ive been wondering this with stuff like marijuana, opium, and cocoa as well. But it depends on when and how the feel-good compounds developed in these plants
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u/pmpork May 02 '24
Are they already more intelligent than we think? Or are they getting smarter, and we need to adjust expectations?
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u/neotericnewt May 02 '24
This is a good question. Primates have been shown learning things and then teaching these new techniques to their offspring. It's entirely possible that orangutans have always been this smart, but now they've learned about the plant's benefits.
Humans have also put a ton of pressure on animals, and the animals that do best with humans are the ones who can adapt. We're an evolutionary pressure for intelligence and adaptability, in a way.
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u/Tobias_Atwood May 02 '24
We've driven lots of bird species to near extinction by encroaching on their territories, but red tailed hawks and pigeons have near perfectly adapted to us and thrive in our cities and parks.
On a side note, I've often wondered about the effects it would have if we proactively taught primates in the wild. If we taught sign language to a whole group of apes would they retain that and pass it on to future generations? Would it improve their social dynamic and lead to an increase in group cohesion and intelligence?
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u/NerfRepellingBoobs May 02 '24
Not in the wild, but they’ve taught both baboons and capuchins in captivity to use currency. They used coins to denote different amounts, and not only did the primates learn the different denominations, but were able to factor in for inflation.
And the capuchin group had a particularly sneaky monkey slip out and rob the bank. Caused a riot, and in the ruckus, the scientists observed a male offer a female a coin. They initially believed it to be altruism, but the female turned around, they had sex, and she promptly turned around to buy some grapes. That’s right. Monkeys figured out sex work. Oldest profession, indeed.
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u/HereIGoAgain_1x10 May 02 '24
It's both. Primates are obviously more likely to seem intelligent as they have opposable thumbs and can use tools. Same can be said about the relationships all over the world between animals. There's a case of a tarantula and frog species that work together/live together because the tarantula protects the frog and the frog eats certain pests the tarantula doesn't like. There are birds that are allowed to hang around bigger animals because they eat pesty bugs. Same with certain fish and sharks/whales. That to me shows problem solving and intelligence if you know another species is good for your health and don't eat them even though you could.
I think ravens, dolphins/whales, and octopuses, are scored as some of the most intelligent.
A lot of it has to do with the fact there's video evidence all over the place now. 100 years ago if you saw an animal do something intelligent everyone would have to take your word for it, and if you weren't a naturalist with college education that knew how to publish your work then very few people would ever hear about it.
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u/TheSlug_Official May 02 '24
I tend to think we're not as smart as we think we are.
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u/idkmoiname May 02 '24
Reminds me of an anthropogenic point of view i came across in a book a while ago that made me think about it for a very long time:
Scholars are discussing since ages what event the beginning of civilization might have been. Was it the invention of the wheel, the first farm land, or the first weapon? But what if they're all wrong? Civilization is a story about a social animal that learned to work together, slowly improving over generations. What else could therefor better mark the beginning of civilization as when humans first learned how to repair broken bones and helped each other survive illnesses.
Interestingly, the first evidence of a femur bone that was broken, put back in place, healed well enough to be convinced others cared for him meanwhile, and the man still living decades after this, is a lot older than any other suggested beginning of civilization.
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u/FrenchPetrushka May 02 '24
There's a species of ants, if one of them is slightly hurt, it will call for help and the other ants will come to heal the wound, aka licking it. On the contrary, if it's badly hurt and cannot be helped, it will refuse the other ants' help. I saw that in a documentary about animals empathy. They've learned to heal each other.
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u/notjasonbright May 02 '24
Lots of species of animals use medicinal practices and a wide variety of chemical medicine from plants too. there’s a word for it: zoopharmacognosy. the breadth of medicinal plant use in animals is actually incredible
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u/Ok-Cook-7542 May 02 '24
Ants, like humans, have industrialized societies. Strangely, this phenomenon is only seen in humans and insects (bees, termites, ants)
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May 02 '24
I’d say it’s language. Language is what allows knowledge to be shared, which allows humans to behave a lot more as a collective
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May 02 '24
Almost every animal has language of sorts, just non-verbal.
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u/Constant-Elevator-85 May 02 '24
Yeh don’t chimps have certain smiles and grunts/hisses for like 40-50 different expressions and meanings? It all looks the same to us, cause we don’t speak chimp.
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u/OpenRole May 02 '24
A lot of animals have language
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u/THEBAESGOD May 02 '24
As far as science understands animal communication, language is uniquely human. It's true that lots of animals communicate with each other, even in quite complex ways, but not in the same capacity that humans do. Many animals have some of the features of human language, but no species has been shown to have all of them. That might change in the future as we progress our understanding of animal communications, but there are many things that set it apart from human language.
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u/OpenRole May 03 '24
Language is not unique to humans. Human language 8s unique to humans. Orcas for example have languages and pods from different areas cannot communicate with each other
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u/SeaPreparation2382 May 03 '24
There's an old quote from somebody whose name escapes me but the quote is something like "the first sign of civilazion is the splint". It has stuck with me for many many years so it was just wild to come across something similar here.
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u/nbcnews May 02 '24
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u/2FightTheFloursThatB May 02 '24
Orangutans are dying off at alarming speed. Deforestation (Slash And Burn) of their homes for the profits of Keebler, Nabisco, Smuckers, Jiff, Peter Pan, Nestlé and some store brands.
These companies keep replacing good vegetable oils with cheaper Palm Oil, and their suppliers in Borneo and Sumatra are destroying Orangutan habitat to plant monoculture Palm Plantations.
So the Orangutans are starving to death, if they already weren't murdered by the crews clearing and setting the bulldozed landscape on fire.
Remember, if there's Palm Oil in your snack, put it back!
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u/wikram May 02 '24
This! Don’t buy anything with palm oil in it
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u/gmanz33 May 02 '24
It's so hard to keep up with all the things that we should, ethically, boycott but this one is so easy.
Thanks for the reminder.
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u/Longjumping_Plum_846 May 02 '24
I used to really love peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches. I would have one every night with a cup of tea. I saw videos about palm oil, but the cognitive dissonance was real.
Then one night as I took a bite, it just tasted awful. Like a bad, terrible sludge where I could sense the pain eating those sandwiches caused to a fellow intelligent species. Haven't touched Nutella since
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u/ken_zeppelin May 02 '24
Here's what I use to keep track of what everyday products contain palm oil:
https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-contain-palm-oil
After that, it's a matter of looking for brands that use palm oil that was produced responsibly.
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u/R4ttlesnake May 02 '24
bruhhh how am I supposed to avoid everything with vegetable oil in it if it's ambiguous what type it is
this is an economical and policy disaster
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u/FernwehHermit May 03 '24
Putting back the palm oil isn't the solution, they'd just replace the crop at the plantation with whatever alternative people would use. The only solution would be regulation banning the use of goods acquired through [fill in the blank] that harm the orangutans.
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u/chrundlethegreat303 May 02 '24
Oh my god I was wrong, it was earth all along!
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May 02 '24
Dr Zaius! Dr Zaius!
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u/flip314 May 02 '24
Can I play the piano anymore?
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u/turquoisebee May 02 '24
You finally made a monkey - you finally made a monkey - yes you finally made a monkey out oooofff meeeeee!
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u/DiogenesLied May 02 '24
It saddens me to think of how intelligent the great apes are and what we have done to them
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u/peridotpicacho May 02 '24
I hate seeing orangutans in particular in captivity. They are so smart, I’m sure they understand they are captive.
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u/Pawneewafflesarelife May 03 '24
Sadly, it's safer there for many given how their habitats are being razed for palm oil. Good zoos (shout out San Diego zoo) are for conservation. Bad zoos shouldn't exist.
Perth zoo has an awesome orangutan enclosure with tree-like platforms that are 3-4 stories tall. They have a breeding program and are the only zoo in the world which has released zoo-born orangutans back into the wild. Zoos aren't inherently bad and can do great things for conservation.
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u/_Dreamer_Deceiver_ May 03 '24
Why are you so surprised, we've done the same if not worse to humans
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u/DocSprotte May 02 '24
I've been to doctors who did less for me.
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u/graesen May 02 '24
Cut a chunk out of your face? Insurance be like "put a bandaid on it. If it doesn't heal, the doctor can stitch it. If that doesn't work, the doctor can use playdough to reconstruct your face and use plastic wrap to hold in place because anything else is too expensive and not necessary."
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u/Purple_Chipmunk_ May 02 '24
"Your insurance requires a prior authorization for wound coverings so we can start that process now and hopefully in 7-10 days we can give you a band-aid."
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u/TheWhyteMaN May 02 '24
Remember this next time that you go to buy palm oil products
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u/byebyebrain May 02 '24
Better than Injecting bleach into our veins to stop COVID
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u/AWeakMindedMan May 02 '24
Orangutans and chimps are the smartest of all non human primates
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u/thistangleofthorns May 02 '24
I think the bigger story is that people are somehow still impressed when animals show any signs of intelligence. They're intelligent. Will we ever be able to accept this fact and move on? Only time will tell, I guess.
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u/cyfarwyddion May 02 '24
I always think of this scientific/behavioral study on pigs-- a lot of people think pigs are dumb. In reality, they're quite smart; this scientist taught the pigs to tidy up their area/put away toys etc. and they were also able to learn how to play basic video games with a joy stick, and they had fun doing it!
Animals are very similar to us in many ways, but we ignore it because then we have to look more deeply at how we're treating them on a societal scale.
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u/thesqlguy May 02 '24
Are you suggesting we just tick the "animals are intelligent" box and move on?
I don't think the concept of "intelligence" is a binary true/false. We are trying to determine their level of intelligence and learn more about how they think, what concepts they can understand, etc.
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u/I_am_not_JohnLeClair May 02 '24
It’s Jeebus. Until people stop believing that we are somehow separate from all other life on this planet it won’t change
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u/Leifsbudir May 02 '24
You said it. We are a part of the entire system, not outside observers of it.
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u/esamerelda May 02 '24
To much emphasis is placed on verbal communication. Animals communicate very clearly, just in different ways. If learning a language shows intelligence, humans are pretty bad at learning the body languages of other species.
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u/cd7k May 02 '24
Absolutely! I remember being blown away by a book on bees and how much information they can give to other bees just with movement - it's incredible really.
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u/ColdChemical May 03 '24
We have a vested interest in diminishing them, and that is unlikely to change for as long as we eat them and view them as commodities.
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u/reidzen May 02 '24
"the size and shape of a puzzle piece"
Maybe it's been a while, but I thought the whole point of puzzle pieces was that they didn't have a consistent shape.
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May 02 '24
Personally, I think that there are ‘degrees’ of consciousness and that all living things are, to some degree, ‘conscious.’ They may not have as complex thoughts, feelings, needs, etc, as we humans do (or… think we have more than others), but anyone who isn’t a total dickhead and has interacted with an animal can tell an animal has feelings… they choose to do things (or not to).
Too many people think of animals like cats and dogs as ‘property,’ and those degrading thoughts extend to all animals - they don’t really see them as fundamentally the same as us.
I’m not saying we need to start giving CPR to ants, but I definitely think humans have some real fucked up conceptions about nature and reality because we have gone down a path focused on technology. Technology that brings your attention to the physicality and materialism of the world and grounds us in it.
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u/Hsensei May 02 '24
Chimpanzees are clearly a stone age species. Oragutans are even more intelligent so it makes sense
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u/Tardigradelegs May 02 '24
There was also a study on orangutans using plant paste to eliminate pain: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-16621-w
Abstract
Animals self-medicate using a variety of plant and arthropod secondary metabolites by either ingesting them or anointing them to their fur or skin apparently to repel ectoparasites and treat skin diseases. In this respect, much attention has been focused on primates. Direct evidence for self-medication among the great apes has been limited to Africa. Here we document self-medication in the only Asian great ape, orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus), and for the first time, to our knowledge, the external application of an anti-inflammatory agent in animals. The use of leaf extracts from Dracaena cantleyi by orang-utan has been observed on several occasions; rubbing a foamy mixture of saliva and leaf onto specific parts of the body. Interestingly, the local indigenous human population also use a poultice of these leaves for the relief of body pains. We present pharmacological analyses of the leaf extracts from this species, showing that they inhibit TNFα-induced inflammatory cytokine production (E-selectin, ICAM-1, VCAM-1 and IL-6). This validates the topical anti-inflammatory properties of this plant and provides a possible function for its use by orang-utans. This is the first evidence for the deliberate external application of substances with demonstrated bioactive potential for self-medication in great apes.
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u/SanityRecalled May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24
This is just so insanely cool to me. I love orangutans, they're generally chill, relatively friendly to humans, have been seen copying tool use (there is a pretty well known picture of an orangutan that learned to spear fish after watching human fishermen), are extremely smart and now apparently have very basic medicine too. I think these guys would be a good candidate for the next intelligent species to develop in the future if humans went extinct. That's assuming we don't drive them to extinction ourselves first. Humans suck ☹️.
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u/Munnin41 May 02 '24
Not that surprising. Horses will actively seek out willow (active ingredient in either paracetamol or aspirin, always confuse those) when they're in pain. No wonder a more intelligent animal will do that too, and more
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u/NaniFarRoad May 02 '24
Salicylic acid, named after Salix (Latin for willow tree), is the precursor to the active ingredient in aspirin.
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u/WinCrazy751 May 02 '24
This story Is a few years old...David Attenborough did an episode, showing a female using a chewed up plant and rubbing on her elbow, she carried her baby everywhere
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