WILD MEDICINE

Ask, Mar 2005 by Braaf, Ellen R

Wild animals have evolved many behaviors that help them avoid injury and disease. And when they do get sick, they sometimes find the medicine they need right in their own environments. Want to know their secrets to good health? Well, here are a few health tips for animals in the wild.

Tip #1-Spit Is Good for You

Have you ever seen your dog or cat lick its wounds? Why do they do it? It probably feels good, but it's good medicine, too. A mammal's saliva contains chemicals that kill germs. In the wild, wolves, monkeys, chimpanzees, lions, tigers, and gorillas lick their wounds, too. Even a human being will suck on a cut finger. Now you know why.

A cheetah that has stepped on a thorn licks its way back to health.

Tip #2-Keep It Clean

To avoid disease, many animals practice good hygiene. Chimpanzees, for instance, hate to be soiled. They'll use handfuls of leaves to wipe away feces (poop), urine, blood, or mud-all of which can carry disease.

Most animals separate their pooping areas from their eating areas. Horses poop and pee far away from the grass they graze on. Rabbits create piles of droppings in special "potty" areas.

Baboons in Amboseli National Park in Kenya sleep on low branches or rock outcroppings. When they poop, their feces fall to the ground. After one or two nights, the baboons move to another of several sleeping groves. They don't return until dung beetles (bugs that dine on poop) have cleaned up the area.

It's a dung beetle picnic, thanks to the baboons.

Tip #3-Pick Off the Pests

More than just causing an annoying itch, pests such as mosquitoes, mites, ticks, fleas, flies, and lice can carry disease. In great numbers, these blood feeders can even suck enough blood to kill an animal. The blood and body tissues of animals are a rich source of nutrients and, for some of these pests, a great place to lay their eggs. Some animals pick the critters off. Others fidget and twitch and move constantly to avoid getting bit.

Monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees usually are not infested with great numbers of skin parasites. That's because they spend hours and hours picking the little pests off each other.

Ah, that feels good. An oxpecker gives an impala some friendly help by picking ticks out of those hard-to-reach places.

Tigers avoid getting bit, beat the heat, and keep an eye out for dinner by spending a good part of the day up to their necks in water.

The deadly moray eel lets little wrasse fish swim in and out of its mouth to dine on parasites and diseased tissue. The wrasse gets a meal; the moray, a cleaning.

Tip #4-Try a Bug Rub

In Venezuela, capuchin monkeys medicate themselves with creepy-crawlies. They search out millipedes, which make chemicals that repel germs and insects. To get a millipede to release its chemicals, a capuchin will rub it, roll over on it, and slide it in and out of its mouth, like a kid savoring a gummy worm-only with lots of drooling to spread the chemical around. Monkeys that don't have a millipede of their own rub up against their drool-covered friends.

More than a hundred different kinds of birds rub ants into their feathers. Usually a bird squishes the ant in its bill then rubs the ant over its body. Some get ants to crawl around in their feathers by plopping down on ant mounds. Squirrels, cats, and monkeys have also been seen "anting." Ants give off formic acid-a poisonous chemical that kills lice and mites.

Tip #5-Make Your Own Medicine

The Navajo and the Blackfoot Indians observed bears dig up osha root, chew it, and smear the saliva-root mixture into their fur so often, they called the plant "bear medicine." Scientists today know the osha plant produces chemicals that kill bacteria and numb pain.

During the rainy season in Costa Rica, when skin pests are especially bothersome, researcher Mary Baker watched capuchin monkeys engage in a furrubbing frenzy. They chewed clematis stems, pepper leaves, and other plant parts to make a plant-saliva mixture, then rubbed it all over their bodies. Baker says, "They really get into it, drooling like crazy, spit flying everywhere." When analyzed in the laboratory, these plants were discovered to contain chemicals that kill insects.

Tip #6-Eat Dirt

Chimpanzees, giraffes, elephants, monkeys, and rhinoceroses eat dirt from termite mounds. (So do some native people in Australia.) Termite-mound soil contains not only clay, which helps soothe upset stomachs and stop diarrhea, but also a type of bacteria that may produce germ-fighting antibiotics. Dirt also provides minerals that wild animals need.

Both oryx and elephants agree-termite-mound dirt really hits the spot.

In western Kenya, generations of elephants have mined out a cave about a mile and a half up the side of Mount Elgon-an inactive volcano. Getting there is risky. The way is littered with the skeletons of those who didn't make it. Almost every night, at the end of the rainy season when plant growth is lush, elephants trek single file through the caves, at times crawling on their knees through low tunnels. They hack out rock with their tusks and grind it between their huge molars-chomping away and eating for hours. The volcanic rocks contain lots of calcium and magnesium and too times more sodium than the plants elephants usually eat. Scientists believe that sodium helps neutralize the poisonous chemicals of plants the elephants feed on.