Wild Orangutan Uses Herbal Medicine to Treat His Wound
Researchers say this may be the first observation of a nonhuman animal purposefully treating a wound with a medicinal plant
The adult male orangutan Rakus was photographed with a facial wound on June 23, 2022 (left). Two days later he applied chewed leaves from an akar kuning plant to the wound. By the time he was photographed again on August 25, 2022 (right), the wound was barely visible.
Armas(left); Safruddin (right)
Deep in the rain forests of Indonesia, there’s no such thing as running to the pharmacy for soap and bandages to tend to a fresh wound. People living in the area have coped by turning the forest itself into a pharmacy, using its plants as medicine—and new evidence shows that at least one nonhuman primate has done so as well. The remarkable observation may be the first time a wild animal has been observed self-medicating with a plant with known therapeutic properties.
Meet Rakus, a male orangutan now likely in his mid-30s, who was first seen in the Suaq Balimbing research area in 2009. In June 2022 researchers monitoring the 150 orangutans in the neighborhood noticed something unusual: Rakus was injured, with an open wound on his flange (a large, flat “cheek” structure that surrounds his face, characterizing him as a sexually mature male orangutan). And he seemed to be purposefully applying plant sap and crushed leaves to the wound—almost like a poultice—according to research describing the behavior, which was published on May 2 in Scientific Reports. “This is a fascinating example of intentional wound treatment in wild orangutans,” says Cheryl Knott, a biological anthropologist at Boston University, who was not involved in the new study. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
In recent decades, scientists have collected numerous observations of many types of animals taking care of themselves. Such behaviors, termed “self-medication,” can be as common as…
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