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Tag: animals

  • Orangutan is first non-human seen treating wounds with medicinal plant

    Orangutan is first non-human seen treating wounds with medicinal plant

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    Rakus the orangutan with an injury on his face, before he applied leaves to the wound

    Armas

    An orangutan has been seen applying the leaves of a plant commonly used in traditional medicine to a cut on its face, seemingly to hasten healing. It is the first case in the scientific record of a non-human animal using a plant with proven therapeutic properties on an open wound.

    There have been several previous reports of great apes attempting to self-medicate in other ways. Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, for example, sometimes swallow whole leaves from Aspilia plants to get rid of intestinal parasites. In 2022, a community of chimpanzees in Gabon was seen putting insects onto their open wounds, potentially as a form of first aid.

    In the latest study, Isabelle Laumer at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, Germany, and her colleagues noticed a fresh gash on the cheek of a male Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) called Rakus, living in Gunung Leuser National Park in Indonesia.

    “Rakus was injured, most likely in a fight with a neighbouring male,” says Laumer.

    Around three days after the fight, the team spotted Rakus chewing on the stem and leaves of an evergreen climbing plant called akar kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria) and swallowing them. But after 13 minutes of feeding, the ape stopped eating and instead smeared the chewed-up plant across his open wound.

    “This went on for 7 minutes,” says Laumer. “He repeatedly put the plant precisely onto the wound, and no other body parts, and then continued feeding on it for half an hour.”

    After four days, the wound had closed up. “It was really fast,” she says.

    In just a month, Rakus’s cheek was completely healed, leaving behind a faint scar.

    Rakus two months after treating his wound

    Safruddin

    The healing process was probably accelerated by the plant, says Laumer, which has been found to have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal and antioxidant properties. It is also commonly used by local people to treat conditions such as malaria and jaundice.

    “To our knowledge, this is the first report of a wild animal precisely treating his wound with quite a potent, medical plant,” says Laumer.

    “This is really wonderful to see,” says Simone Pika at Osnabrück University in Germany. “Of course, it’s only one case. So, there are still so many questions: Is this a behaviour he would do again? Is this a behaviour other individuals of his group would do?”

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  • Odd bump on praying mantis chest is actually world’s weirdest tongue

    Odd bump on praying mantis chest is actually world’s weirdest tongue

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    Certain mantis species, like Kongobatha diademata, flatten their bodies against leaves, a practice called leaf-planking

    Ruth S (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)

    Some mantises can taste leaves with a newly discovered sensory organ: a strange, bristly bump projecting from their chests.

    This “gustifolium” is unlike anything seen in mantises or any other predatory insects, say the researchers who made the discovery. It may have evolved to aid certain mantises’ extremely specialised lifestyles.

    Some praying mantis species found in Asia and Australia engage in “leaf-planking”, flattening their bodies against the underside of leaves as they cling, motionless.

    …

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  • Foxes’ skulls are specially adapted for diving into snow

    Foxes’ skulls are specially adapted for diving into snow

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    New Scientist Default Image

    A red fox about to dive into the snow to catch prey

    Maxime Riendeau/Getty Images

    Some foxes can dive headfirst into snow without harm, and now we know how their skull shape is adapted for this technique.

    In cold climates, where small rodents live deep under the snow, red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) have a specialised hunting technique known as mousing. They use their strong sense of hearing to pinpoint the location of prey, jump into the air and then dive face-first into large piles of snow at speeds of up to 4 metres per second to catch them by surprise.

    “It’s a very interesting and unique behaviour,” says Sunghwan Jung at Cornell University in New York. “Not all foxes do it either.”

    To learn more about why red and Arctic foxes are so adept at snow-diving, Jung and his colleagues scanned the skulls of 13 fox species as well as those of other mammals, such as lynx and pumas, from museum collections.

    Their analysis found that felines tended to have wider and shorter snouts compared with foxes. This gives them a stronger bite, says Jung, which is more useful for cats as they are usually solitary hunters.

    Meanwhile, foxes, which hunt in packs, had much longer, pointier skulls. This leads to a weaker bite. Red and Arctic foxes share a similarly narrow muzzle that is slightly more elongated than those of other foxes.

    The team dropped 3D-printed models of a regular Arctic fox skull and a flattened version of the skull into snow from a height of 50 centimetres.

    “What we found was that the sharper snout reduces the impact, by compressing the snow less,” says Jung. This reduces the risk of injury. The lengthier, pointier snout gently pushes the snow to the side, almost like a fluid, he says. “This kind of elongated shape helps foxes dive into snow safely, so they can focus on hunting.”

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  • Bowhead whales still harmed from whaling that ended a century ago

    Bowhead whales still harmed from whaling that ended a century ago

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    K2BPCD Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) breaching, Canada, Arctic Ocean.

    Bowheads feel the impacts of commercial whaling 100 years later

    Doc White/Nature Picture Library/Alamy

    Commercial whaling of bowheads ended about a century ago, but the industry’s footprint could threaten the species’ future.

    Before people sought their blubber for oil and their baleen for tools and clothes, bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) flourished. This was despite drastic ancient climate change, including a warm period between around 8500 and 10,000 years ago. But whaling reduced global bowhead numbers to as low as 3000 individuals by the early 20th century. The US, Canada and Norway have since…

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  • Alpacas are the only mammals known to directly inseminate the uterus

    Alpacas are the only mammals known to directly inseminate the uterus

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    The alpaca (Vicugna pacos) uses a reproductive technique never confirmed in any other mammal

    Zoonar GmbH / Alamy

    Alpacas are the only mammals known to science in which males deposit sperm directly into the uterus. This unusual reproductive method inflicts small internal injuries that may help improve the chances of pregnancy.

    Patricia Brennan at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and her team examined and dissected the reproductive systems of 10 female alpacas that were euthanised within 24 hours of mating. They found bloody abrasions throughout the whole reproductive tract, suggesting that the male alpaca’s…

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  • Culling predatory starfish conserves coral on the Great Barrier Reef

    Culling predatory starfish conserves coral on the Great Barrier Reef

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    A diver injecting vinegar into a crown-of-thorns starfish as part of the culling programme

    CSIRO

    A culling programme has succeeded in protecting key areas of the Great Barrier Reef from voracious coral-eating starfish. Scientists who analysed the outcome say the effort should be expanded to conserve more of the reef.

    Crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) are relentless feeders on nearly all species of coral within Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Each starfish can reach 1 metre in diameter and eat 10 square metres of coral reef each year.

    The starfish are native to the reef, but it is thought increasing nutrients pouring into the reef’s waters from agriculture and other human factors have increased their numbers and worsened the destruction of corals. Between 1985 and 2012, they accounted for 40 per cent of the region’s coral loss.

    During a major reef-wide eruption of the starfish between 2012 and 2022, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority carried out a large-scale culling programme. Teams of divers inject the starfish with a single shot of either vinegar or ox bile, which kills them and prevents the release of larvae.

    Roger Beeden at the Park Authority and his colleagues found that in areas where timely culling was implemented, the outbreaks were limited and coral cover recovered and increased by up to 44 per cent. Where no culling took place, the loss of coral was severe. The study also confirmed that by preventing outbreaks at strategically important reefs, larvae didn’t spread in currents to other reefs, meaning further outbreaks were reduced.

    Until now, the programme has focused on 500 of the marine park’s 3000 reefs, which are spread throughout the park but were chosen because they have important value to the tourism industry or are known to be important in the spread of the starfish.

    “The outcomes we have found in this study are a result of using integrated pest management to target [the starfish] on the right reefs at the right time – just like plague locust and other pest species management,” says Beeden.

    But the researchers recommend that the programme should expand from its current fleet of five to seven ships to between 10 and 15 ships. “At any one time, out of that 500, about a third to a half are in play with current outbreaks,” says Beeden.

    Terry Hughes, at James Cook University in Townsville, doesn’t agree that the culling programme is worthwhile. “It’s increasingly clear that attempts to protect corals on the Great Barrier Reef by culling crown-of-thorns starfish on a handful of reefs is just a drop in the ocean,” he says.

    Hughes says geographical differences in the number of starfish and amounts of corals – which the study attributed to the level of culling in different parts of the Great Barrier Reef – could be explained by which regions have been affected most by recent cyclones and by mass coral bleaching events. Beeden acknowledges that these factors are hard to separate from the effects of culling, but says: “Our results are strengthened, and not confounded by the fact that the coral cover gains in the Townsville region were achieved despite two mass bleaching events in 2020 and 2022.”

    Instead, the priority should be to tackle global warming, which is driving a rise in the frequency and intensity of coral bleaching, says Hughes. “After every bleaching event the Australian government announces more money for killing starfish on a small subset of reefs, shifting the focus from dealing with the causes of these outbreaks, or from reducing Australia’s emissions of greenhouse gases,” he says.

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  • Doctors Combined a Heart Pump and Pig Kidney Transplant in Breakthrough Surgery

    Doctors Combined a Heart Pump and Pig Kidney Transplant in Breakthrough Surgery

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    A 54-year-old New Jersey woman has become the second living person to receive a genetically engineered pig kidney. The surgery, carried out at NYU Langone Health on April 12, also involved transplanting the pig’s thymus gland to help prevent rejection.

    The patient, Lisa Pisano, had a mechanical heart pump implanted days before getting the transplant. She was facing heart failure and end-stage kidney disease and wasn’t eligible for a human organ transplant because of several other medical conditions. Her medical team says she’s recovering well.

    “I feel fantastic,” Pisano said from her hospital bed over Zoom during a press conference on Wednesday. “When this opportunity came, I said, ‘I’m gonna take advantage of it.’”

    It’s the first instance of a patient with a mechanical heart pump receiving an organ transplant of any kind. It is the second known transplant of a gene-edited pig kidney into a living person, and the first with the pig’s thymus combined.

    The series of procedures was performed over a span of nine days. In the first, surgeons implanted the heart pump, a device called a left ventricular assist device, to replace the function of her failing heart. It’s used in patients who are awaiting heart transplantation or otherwise aren’t a candidate for a heart transplant. Without it, Pisano’s life expectancy would have been just days or weeks.

    Close up of surgeon working on organ transplant

    PHOTOGRAPH: JOE CARROTTA FOR NYU LANGONE HEALTH

    The second surgery involved transplanting the pig organs. The animal’s thymus gland, which is responsible for educating the immune system, was placed under the covering of the kidney. The addition of the pig thymus is meant to reprogram Pisano’s immune system to be less likely to reject the kidney and hopefully allow doctors to reduce the amount of immunosuppressive drugs she has to take, said Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute, during the press conference.

    It’s the latest attempt to transplant an animal organ in a person—a process known as xenotransplantation—as a potential way to address the organ shortage and offer transplants to people who otherwise wouldn’t get them. In the US alone, there are more than 100,000 people on the national transplant waiting list, and every day 17 people die waiting for an organ. Strict eligibility criteria means that organs are prioritized for relatively healthy patients, leaving patients like Pisano with few other options.

    Starting in 2021, the NYU team began experimenting with transplanting genetically engineered pig hearts and kidneys into deceased humans following brain death. With the consent of their families, the patients were kept on a ventilator so that researchers could assess the viability of the pig organs. In one instance, a pig kidney was able to function in a human body for up to two months—a record for xenotransplantation. In monkeys, pig kidneys have been shown to work for up to two years. Now, scientists are testing whether they can support humans in need of new kidneys.

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  • Exquisite fossils of Cretaceous shark solve mystery of how it hunted

    Exquisite fossils of Cretaceous shark solve mystery of how it hunted

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    A Ptychodus shark fossil found in Mexico

    Romain Vullo

    Exquisitely preserved fossils of a shark that thrived during the Cretaceous period appear to solve a long-standing mystery around how it hunted and where it fits into the shark evolutionary tree.

    Fossil teeth from sharks in the genus Ptychodus have made their way into museums for over 200 years, and while some members of this group clearly grew massive, the rest of their anatomy remained largely unknown.

    This left researchers unsure about the shark’s overall appearance and feeding habits, although the broad, flat shape of the teeth suggests they were suited to crushing hard-shelled prey.

    Now, Romain Vullo at the University of Rennes in France and his colleagues have reported the discovery of six spectacular, full-body Ptychodus fossils in Mexico. They reveal that this shark belonged to the Lamniformes, a group encompassing many modern shark species, ranging from great whites to basking sharks.

    This is intriguing because, regardless of their diet, lamniform sharks tend to be highly active predators that hunt in open water, unlike any shell-crushing, or durophagous, organism alive today.

    “The particularity of Ptychodus is that it is so far the only known open-water, fast-swimming shark with a durophagous diet,” says Vullo. “This suggests that ptychodontids preyed on well-armoured pelagic [open-water] organisms, such as large ammonites and sea turtles.”

    While the individuals they studied are small, at under 3 metres, the researchers estimate from tooth size that some members of the genus reached around 9.7 metres in length. This is roughly double the length of great whites – the females tend to be larger and generally measure between 4.6 and 4.9 metres.

    For a time during the Cretaceous, Ptychodus sharks were really numerous, and are likely to have been key players in marine food chains, says Charles Underwood at Birkbeck, University of London, yet we knew next to nothing about them until now. “It’s almost the last jigsaw piece in putting together Cretaceous ecosystems,” he says.

    Based on their size and feeding habits, it is possible that Ptychodus species were in competition with large marine reptiles, which also developed crushing dentition during the late Cretaceous, says Underwood. This may help explain why Ptychodus sharks appear to have died out some time before the end-Cretaceous extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, he says.

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  • Nocturnal ants use polarised moonlight to find their way home

    Nocturnal ants use polarised moonlight to find their way home

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    Nocturnal bull ants use polarised moonlight to find their way back to their nests

    Cody Freas

    They may have a brain the size of a pinhead and terrible eyesight, but bull ants can navigate at night using even the faintest polarised light emitted by a crescent moon.

    Light from the sun and the moon consists of waves that vibrate in different directions, but on entering the atmosphere it becomes polarised, meaning the waves are aligned in the same direction across the sky. Many animals can detect this polarity in sunlight and use it…

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  • Animals may help ecosystems store 3 times more carbon than we thought

    Animals may help ecosystems store 3 times more carbon than we thought

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    Elephants boost carbon storage by trampling and grazing on small trees

    Art Konovalov/Shutterstock

    Animals may enable many ecosystems to store two to three times as much carbon as they would without them, according to a new model. This suggests animals may play a much more important role in how much carbon is stored and released than previously thought.

    “Animals do a lot of different things,” says Matteo Rizzuto at Yale University. “They move around. They urinate. They defecate. They give birth. They die. And all of those things are part of the…

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