Watch this mama chimp treat her son’s open wound by applying insect “poultice”

In November 2019, Alessandra Mascaro was observing a community of chimpanzees in the Loango National Park in Gabon as part of her volunteer service with the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project when she noticed some unusual behavior. A chimp named Suzee was inspecting a wound on the foot of her son, Tanto. Suzee suddenly caught an insect from a nearby leaf, put this into her mouth for a moment, and then pressed that to Sia’s wound.

Mascaro caught the unusual interaction on video and forwarded the idea to two scientists on the particular project: Tobias Deschner, a primatologist with the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project, and Simone Pika, a cognitive biologist at Osnabrück University. The researchers thought the interaction could be suggestive of prosocial behavior among chimpanzees and the capacity for empathy—a question of heated debate within the field—and they spent typically the next 15 months looking for other examples of this type of wound-treating behavior. All told, they recorded 76 such instances and reported their findings inside a new correspondence published in this journal Current Biology.

There are between 42 and 45 chimps in the Loango Nationwide Park community. According to often the authors, the males are much more prone to open wounds than females (with a ratio associated with 63: 13) since they tend to have more aggressive interactions. The wound-treating incidents (both self-applied and applying insects to your wounds of others) were filmed whenever possible, and that footage was transcribed into detailed written reports. In some cases, there was no video footage, so the researchers wrote a detailed report the same day it occurred.