Sarah Biren
Sarah Biren
May 14, 2024 ·  4 min read

World First: Orangutan Observed Using Medicinal Plant to Treat Wound

Researchers have long documented human-like behaviors in animals. For instance, dolphins are known to play games with each other, and elephants mourn and bury their diseased brethren. But aside from sharing moods like playfulness and sadness, some animals display ingenuity that’s typically attributed only to people. In this case, a new study in the journal Scientific Reports documents an orangutan self-medicating with a pain reliever and poultice, just as humans would take an aspirin and use antibiotic ointment to treat a wound.

Rakus the Orangutan

Rakus the orangutan with a pink wound under his eye
Photo: Saidi Agam / Suaq Project

Male orangutans are known for being combative with one another. Fights can last a few minutes to over an hour and result in serious injuries to both animals, like missing digits or eyes or gashes on their faces or heads. So researchers were unsurprised to find Rakus the orangutan with a chunk of flesh missing from his cheek and another wound in his mouth. However, they were surprised to see what the male did next.

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Rakus Self-Medicates

Akar Kuning leaves (Fibraurea tinctoria)
Photo: Saidi Agam / Suaq Project

Over several days following the supposed fight, Rakus frequently chewed on leaves from a specific liana plant called Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), not a typical food for his species but it is a pain reliever known to humans. Rakus also chewed the leaves into a paste and pressed it to his face wound, which eventually healed without any sign of infection. [1]

“Orangutans at the site rarely eat the plant,” said Caroline Schuppli, an evolutionary biologist with the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. “However, individuals may accidentally touch their wounds while feeding on this plant and thus unintentionally apply the plant’s juice to their wounds. As Fibraurea tinctoria has potent analgesic effects, individuals may feel an immediate pain release, causing them to repeat the behavior several times.” Locals use this plant to treat diabetes and malaria. [2]

“It’s the first documentation of external self-medication — the application of leaves, I would argue, as a poultice, like humans do to treat wounds and pains,” said Michael Huffman, an associate professor at the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto Univercity in Japan. [3]

This study showed that orangutans can identify and use plants for pain relief. This leads to further research into other animals who self-medicate in different ways. 

Zoopharmacognasy

Rakus the orangutan with a pink wound under his eye
Photo: Saidi Agam / Suaq Project

Zoopharmacognasy is the scientific term for when animals self-medicate using the resources around them. It’s unclear whether this practice is learned or instinctual but it’s fascinating all the same. Examples include red and green macaws who eat clay to help digest food and kill bacteria, and pregnant elephants in Kenya who eat certain leaves to induce birth. Even dogs can self-medicate by eating grass to help them vomit to relieve a stomach bug or parasite. [4]

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The Gunung Leuser National Park

Rakus the orangutan, fully healed
Photo: Safruddin 

The study on Rakus’s behavior was based on observing him in his home in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park, a protected area of the rainforest. Rakus was first noticed there in 2009. He belongs to a group of 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans.

We don’t disturb the orangutan,” said an author of the new study, Isabelle Laumer, a primatologist and cognitive biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. “They completely tolerate us following them.” 

However, the authors had never seen any other subject self-medicate in this way before so they don’t know how Rakus learned it. It may have been a personal, accidental discovery or something he learned in his youth from others who had experimented with this plant.

They learn a lot about, for example, what types of fruit to eat, where to find them, when to find them, when they are ripe, how to process them,” Laumer said. “Some orangutans feed on up to 400 different plants. … This is quite some intensive knowledge that they actually need to acquire.”

A Critically Endangered Species

Orangutan eating fruit near funny baby primate hanging on liana
Photo: Pexels

There is much more to learn from orangutans, perhaps more than any other species, which makes their conservation even more important.

“They are our closest relatives and this again points towards the similarities we share with them. We are more similar than we are different,” said Laumer. And Rakus shows that not only do people and orangutans share genetics, they share knowledge, which means that humans may discover more remedies by observing more cases of animals self-medicating. [5]

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Sources

  1. Gayathri Vaidyanathan. “‘Orangutan, heal thyself’: First wild animal seen using medicinal plant.” Nature. May 2, 2024
  2. Dennis Thompson. “An Orangutan Healed Himself With Medicinal Plant.” Health Day. May 3, 2024
  3. Evan Bush. “In a first, an orangutan was seen treating his wound with a medicinal plant.” NBC News. May 2, 2024
  4. Joel Shurkin. “Animals that self-medicate.” PNAS. December 9, 2014
  5. Georgina Rannard. “Wounded orangutan seen using plant as medicine.” BBC. May 3, 2024