WILD chimpanzees and gorillas stumbled accidentally onto a way to treat stomach bugs.
When afflicted by stomach pains, the apes often fold up bristly leaves and swallow them whole, allowing the rough, undigested material to pass through their guts and flush out intestinal parasites such as nematode worms. Now an experiment to investigate this behaviour suggests that it was inquisitiveness about novel foods, rather than a desire to cure themselves, that prompted the animals to try the technique in the first place.
Michael Huffman and Satoshi Hirata gave 11 chimpanzees at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Japan rough leaves…
