Oh Those Amazing Animals

Recently I have been fascinated by some of the quirkier attributes of animals. I wrote about dolphin intelligence not so long ago, but today I was reading about zoopharmacognosy and despite what spell-check tells you it is actually a word (try it in scrabble). Zoopharmacognosy is the way animals use natural medicines to heal themselves. Most of it is innate knowledge that was not passed down to them in anyway we can detect (so perhaps there is an animal conspiracy keeping us from know the truly life saving stuff). Some of the examples that I read about were birds that could pick out antibiotics and chimpanzees who ate certain plants that would make them sick for a time but ultimately heal them. I also recently read about a type of monkey that would search ant hives for a certain type of caterpillar and rub the insect all over their body, and then pass it onto the next monkey, until one of the monkeys would put the caterpillar in its mouth swish it about and then start the rubbing process again. Apparently the bug put off a powerful insect repellent that the monkeys then used, and putting the caterpillar in the mouth was simply to get it to start producing the chemicals again. What really interested one of the researchers is that the caterpillars chemicals produced a truly awful taste, the researcher discovered this firsthand by sticking of the bugs in his own mouth (fun stuff). Anyways, I just have been finding it interesting to learn that a lot of the things that we think are unique to humans really aren't. It will be interesting to see what we know in the future, because I'm sure we'll find out that even though we thought we had a good grasp on things that really we were pretty clueless.