Saturday, May 04, 2024
Orangutan seen treating wound with a medicinal plant — a first
In a first, an orangutan was seen treating his wound with a medicinal plant
"After an orangutan hurt his face, scientists observed him chewing a plant known to relieve pain and applying a paste made from the leaves to the injury.
An orangutan named Rakus hit a rough patch in the summer of 2022.
Researchers heard a fight between male orangutans in the treetops of a rainforest in Sumatra, Indonesia; a day later, they spotted Rakus sporting a pink wound below his right eyelid.
A chunk of flesh about the size and shape of a puzzle piece was missing. When Rakus, who is most likely in his 30s, belted out a long call, the researchers noticed another wound inside his mouth.
Over the next several days, researchers followed Rakus at a distance — and saw something so surprising they wound up reporting it in great detail in the journal Scientific Reports.
According to their study, published Thursday, Rakus was observed repeatedly chewing on the leaves of a particular liana plant over several days. The climbing vine is not a typical food for orangutans, but it is known to humans as a pain reliever.
On at least one occasion, Rakus made a paste from the chewed leaves and applied it to his face. It’s the first time an animal has been seen applying medicine to a skin wound.
“It’s the first documentation of external self-medication — the application of leaves, I would argue, as a poultice, like humans do to treat wounds and pains,” said Michael Huffman, an associate professor at the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto University in Japan, who was not involved in the new study.
Rakus’ wound never showed signs of becoming infected, and it closed up within a week.
The discovery is new evidence that orangutans are able to identify and use pain-relieving plants. A growing body of research suggests other animal species also self-medicate, with varying levels of sophistication.
The researchers behind the study think that great apes’ ability to identify medicines and treat wounds could trace back to a shared ancestor with humans.
New evidence that orangutans self-medicate
The discovery was possible only because Rakus spends his days in a protected area of rainforest called the Suaq Balimbing research area, in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park.
Researchers have been observing orangutans there since 1994. Today, about 150 call the area home. Rakus, who was first observed there in 2009, is either a resident or a frequent visitor.
Scientists often follow an individual orangutan in the area from early morning — when it leaves its night nest — until it builds a new night nest about 12 hours later.
“We don’t disturb the orangutan,” said an author of the new study, Isabelle Laumer, a primatologist and cognitive biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. “They completely tolerate us following them.”
Laumer said that researchers had never before observed orangutans in the area self-medicating like Rakus did and that it was not clear how he developed the behavior.
It’s possible Rakus learned to treat his wound through “individual innovation,” Laumer said, after he accidentally touched a finger to a wound with the pain-relieving leaf juice. Or he may have learned the behavior culturally, from other orangutans, early in life.
Orangutans learn socially and have been shown to be capable with tools. They develop sophisticated knowledge of foods from their mothers.
“They learn a lot about, for example, what types of fruit to eat, where to find them, when to find them, when they are ripe, how to process them,” Laumer said. “Some orangutans feed on up to 400 different plants. … This is quite some intensive knowledge that they actually need to acquire.”
Did humans learn about medicinal plants from animals?
Evidence of animal self-medication has mounted in recent decades.
In the 1960s, the famous primatologist Jane Goodall noticed that chimpanzees in Tanzania were eating whole leaves from a plant later identified as a type of Aspilia shrub. Decades later, Huffman wrote a paper describing how a different population of chimpanzees ate the bitter pith of a particular daisy, but only rarely and when other behaviors suggested they were sick.
Researchers think chimps developed such behaviors to treat or prevent parasites.
In the 1990s and the 2000s, a flood of research identified additional examples of self-medication.
A notable 2008 study of Bornean orangutans documented three females rubbing their bodies with a paste of chewed Dracaena cantleyi plant, which local Indigenous people use to address joint and bone pain.
Huffman said he thinks all animal species self-medicate to some degree. Researchers have even documented the practice in insects.
“It shows us that animals have control over their lives,” he said. “That they can behave in ways that are flexible, that are adaptive to certain circumstances that come down to their very survival.”
He theorized that ancient humans derived the ability to identify medicinal plants and substances from close observations of animals.
“A lot of medicine that humans have used over in our history as a species have come from our close connection with nature and looking to other animals for advice and extrapolating from what we’ve learned,” Huffman said. “I don’t know of any plant that an animal has been documented to be using as medicine that isn’t also used by humans. And I think that it’s the humans who have learned from the animals.”
Laumer said her team’s findings — in a species that is 97% genetically similar to humans — could offer insight into how ancient primates developed their inclination to pursue medicines.
“It’s possible that our last common ancestor already showed similar forms of ointment behavior,” she said.
Laumer added that the new findings also show how much can be learned from orangutans, who are considered critically endangered. The rainforests where Sumatran orangutans live are vanishing as land is converted to agriculture and climate change intensifies wildfires.
The latest estimates, from 2016, suggest fewer than 14,000 are left.
Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at Evan.Bush@nbcuni.com."
Friday, May 03, 2024
Opinion | What Does African Rejection Mean for the U.S.? - The New York Times
What Does African Rejection Mean for the U.S.?
By Cameron Hudson
"Mr. Hudson is a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
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The forced withdrawal, announced last month, of more than 1,000 U.S. Special Operations troops and drone operators in Niger and Chad should raise the alarm for Washington. In Africa, our policy of strengthening security partnerships rather than supporting democracy has not worked. The United States needs a new approach.
The troops had been dispatched there as a key part of America’s effort to confront terrorism, and the pullout follows the governments’ demands for new rules and regulations on U.S. military operations.
Russia, and increasingly Iran and other countries, are already stepping in to exploit a growing power vacuum in the region. That should be yet another reason for America to change course. Africa is less secure and less democratic today than when the United States sent those forces a decade ago. Given the rising influence of these other nations, that current is certain to speed up.
With Washington now forced from the front line of fighting terrorism in the region, it has the opportunity of taking a different approach: directly helping African countries deal with their economic and social problems by pushing for inclusive governance and stronger institutions. A commitment to promoting democracy, once pejoratively called nation-building, is often the first thing to go when the United States becomes ensnared in responding to local crises, as it had with terror threats in the Sahel, a semiarid area south of the Sahara.
U.S. officials would do well to remember that Africans are choosing their partners to advance their own interests, not America’s. If African governments are deciding to align themselves with Moscow over Washington, we should try to understand why rather than castigating them.
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For many Sahelian leaders, choosing a strong ally is a simple matter of trying to stay in power. Moscow’s military support, offered under the guise of counterterrorism, helps. Here, Washington cannot and should not compete.
But other leaders are motivated more by a desire to diversify partnerships and to get the best deal when building infrastructure, improving education and agriculture, and extracting ores and minerals.
The roots of Washington’s worry about security concerns in the wider Sahel region emerged in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. Weak governance and crushing poverty were seen as accelerants for a potential jihadist problem. But it was only in 2012, when extremist groups that were linked to Al Qaeda began seizing control of cities across northern Mali, that U.S. troops arrived in the region.
Since then, however, these jihadists have not displayed nearly the threat to U.S. interests that our level of military involvement would suggest. Instead, they preyed on fragile governments across the Sahel. Civilian leaders were unable to roll back the threat and failed to bring services to, or provide government control of, their countries’ increasingly populous and poor hinterlands.
The result is a region very different from the one the United States met when it first began sending security trainers and sharing sensitive intelligence in 2012. Six military governments and a host of new Russian military outposts now dot the region.
Along with the news last month of the U.S. forced departures from Niger and Chad, two countries the United Nations has said are on the front lines of the “global epicenter of terrorism,” the junta-run states of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have expelled France, the former colonial power.
To be sure, losing a military foothold in Niger and Chad makes it harder for the United States to monitor jihadists across a dozen African countries and to track human smuggling, drug trafficking and the illicit flow of arms, all of which are destabilizing the continent. U.S. military officials are already fanning out across West Africa, looking for new hosts for its drones.
But beyond the tactical losses, the withdrawal represents a genuine strategic loss for Washington.
Countries including Russia and Iran have seen an opportunity in Africa to make gains in great, and not-so-great, power competition. Every country from which France, and now the United States, have departed has welcomed Russian military advisers, mostly in the form of Moscow’s successor to the Wagner Group, Africa Corps. Russian forces can now move freely across friendly African states from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
One day soon, Moscow hopes to add warm-water ports on the Red Sea and even the Atlantic coast of Africa. These can be used to supply its growing military presence across the continent and export Africa’s prized mineral resources. Iran has similarly spied an opening to break its diplomatic isolation and turn a profit, eyeing purchase agreements with Niger’s state-linked uranium company and selling advanced weapons to Sudan’s army, helping to fuel that country’s yearlong civil war.
U.S. officials routinely frame this struggle for influence as a new Cold War. That view makes Washington no friends in African countries, where officials believe that America isn’t really interested in them beyond not wanting to lose ground to rivals. The message that Gen. Michael Langley, the head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, delivered to Congress in March is a case in point. “A number of countries are at the tipping point of actually being captured by the Russian Federation,” he said, “as they are spreading some of their false narratives.” His message suggests a view in Washington of African nations being unwittingly duped.
Rather than escalating this competition any further, Washington should reassess the actual jihadist threat to U.S. interests and weigh the ultimate cost of security partnerships with countries lacking in democratic institutions. It should now reflect on whether the tools it has favored for so long — intelligence sharing, military training and weapons supplying — really make sense in weak and desperately poor states.
Washington has long struggled to strike a balance between protecting its position and advancing democratic values in Africa. For it to succeed, it must recognize that in this era of geopolitical choice, it can no longer dictate the terms of its partnerships with African states. If it does, it will find itself increasingly alone and unable to advance either its interests or its values on this increasingly strategic continent."
Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course - The New York Times
Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course
"To get protesters off campus lawns, Brown University and others have agreed to consider ending investments linked to Israel. But how?
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Desperate to stem protests that have convulsed campuses across the country, a small number of universities have agreed to reconsider their investments in companies that do business with Israel.
The deals, which have eased tension on campuses with only a few days left before students break for the summer, would have been unthinkable even a week ago. And they’re a gamble, potentially putting universities on a collision course with influential donors, politicians and students who support Israel.
The schools are still far from pulling money: Brown University, the liberal Ivy League institution, agreed this week only to hold a board vote this fall on whether its $6.6 billion endowment should divest from any Israeli-connected holdings. In exchange, the pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus's main lawn was dismantled.
Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota have also struck deals with student protesters to clear camps in exchange for a commitment to discuss the schools’ investment policies around Israel. The moves could add pressure on administrators at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina, among others, where protesters have made divestment from Israel a central rallying cry.
The issue of financial divestment from Israel has long been an untouchable one, both in American politics and among the Wall Street titans who manage university endowments and make up a large source of donations. Taking sides now is a surefire way to inflame at least one faction in a conflict that has divided campuses, split the Democratic Party and handed Republican lawmakers a cudgel with which to attack the institutions.
Even the renewed talk of divestment has raised alarms among the well-heeled donors whom few universities dare cross, and who have exerted influence over the debate on college campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza. Billionaires, including the fund manager William A. Ackman and Marc Rowan, a private-equity chieftain, mounted campaigns to remove the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania over their handling of antisemitism on their campuses.
Brown’s agreement will let students make their case and then have the Brown Corporation, the university’s governing body, vote on the matter in October. It was partly negotiated by the university president, Christina H. Paxson, who met directly with student protesters last Friday, proposing a “path forward” that included allowing a small group of activists to discuss the divestment proposal with a contingent from the corporation later this month, the university said.
But Dr. Paxson’s initial offer did not include bringing a divestment proposal to a vote. That came after two university negotiators and six students involved with the Brown Divest Coalition, one of the groups behind the movement, reached a deal on Tuesday, the university and several students said.
The agreement immediately gave the university control of its facilities in time to allow students to finish classes and hold in-person graduation ceremonies and an alumni reunion this month. One donor, an investor who has made sizable contributions to the university and describes himself as a supporter of Israel, said members of the administration had assured him that Brown wouldn’t ultimately divest from Israel.
The administration, this donor said, could still take steps to prevent a vote.
A Brown spokesman, Brian Clark, said the corporation was “fully committed” to voting on the matter.
Some other donors said they saw the agreement as a smart way to push off the issue until a time when the situation in Israel and Gaza may be less intense.
But in interviews, several donors — ranging from recent graduates to millionaire financiers and one billionaire — said going through with divestment would cross a bright line. They said they would reduce, or cut entirely, their donations to the university.
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While they were skeptical that Brown would ultimately pull any money from investments linked to Israel, some were dismayed that their alma mater appeared to have even partly given in to protesters. Most asked not to be named because of the delicate nature of the matter.
Harry Chalfin, a 26-year-old Brown graduate whose parents also earned degrees from the Providence, R.I., school, said he would closely watch the divestment debate.
“We would consider using our family’s not-tremendous-but-not-negligible financial leverage to pressure Brown on this,” said Mr. Chalfin, whose father works in investment management.
Universities carefully control their endowments, typically revealing little about how they invest billions of dollars, and any consideration of moving funds away from Israel is a victory for protesters agitated over what they say has been insufficient support from the institutions for Gaza. That position puts investing in Israel on a par with investing in fossil fuels, which has become a nonstarter now for many colleges.
“There will be donors who are against this. Our argument is: That can’t matter,” said Rafi Ash, a Brown sophomore who helped lead the protest on the university’s main lawn.
The divestment movement targeting Israel predates the current war in Gaza. At Brown, the formal campaign dates back to at least 2019, when students voted in favor of a referendum proposal that called for the university to divest from “companies complicit in human rights abuses in Palestine.”
In 2020, a university committee that considers the ethical standards of Brown’s investing recommended that the university divest from 10 companies it said were helping Israel commit human-rights abuses. It also outlined criteria for considering ethical investment with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At the time, Dr. Paxson turned away the efforts, saying the endowment was “not a political instrument” to resolve complex issues. In 2021, she refused to move forward the divestment proposal, in part because it lacked a “requisite level of specificity.”
The most recent divestment proposal borrows heavily from the old one, using the same criteria laid out in 2020. Student protesters see it as a practical way for the school to pressure Israel to agree to a cease-fire, and cite as a precedent Brown’s divestment from investing directly in South Africa during the 1980s, Darfur two decades ago and fossil fuels starting in 2017.
Supporters of Israel say those comparisons are off base, and see the nation’s incursion in Gaza as a defensive response to Hamas’s October rampage and hostage taking. One longstanding response to such calls is that divestment from Israel stems from antisemitism, because activists are targeting the only Jewish country in the world and not seeking divestment from other nations accused of engaging in human-rights atrocities.
And Rhode Island is one of more than two dozen states with laws that could penalize efforts to boycott, issue sanctions against or divest from Israel, though those measures have been challenged on freedom-of-speech grounds.
But there are also practical challenges with any effort to divest. One, simply, is identifying what to divest and how to define the terms of such a policy.
Some academics question whether divestment works, with research finding that it has little to no impact on the bottom lines or behavior of targeted firms. Others point to the logistical complexity of divesting: As a private institution, Brown isn’t required to disclose all of its endowment’s investments, and in fact says almost nothing about them. Some 96 percent of its coffers are invested via outside asset managers.
The Brown Divest Coalition said it wanted to the university to sell off “stocks, funds, endowment and other monetary instruments from companies facilitating and profiting from Israeli human rights abuses.” It outlined criteria for divesting from certain companies, drawing upon lists compiled by three organizations, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The students acknowledge that they don’t even know if Brown invests in any of those companies. That’s because what Brown does with its money — and how the institution or any other school would get rid of them — is hardly straightforward.
Brown does not disclose its outside asset managers or their investments. Members of Brown’s corporation did not respond to requests for comment.
“The university has not endorsed the divestment proposal,” Mr. Clark, the Brown spokesman, said in a statement. “Whether it’s for or against divestment, the vote will bring clarity to an issue that is of longstanding interest to many members of our community.”
Several steps remain before Brown’s board votes on divestment. First, five of the protesting students will meet with five members of the corporation during its regular meetings this month. In a letter to the university community on Tuesday, Dr. Paxson said she hoped the meeting would “allow for a full and frank exchange of views.”
Said Stewart Baker, a Brown alumnus and donor: “This is a great way to push the issue aside.”