From the archive
28 Aug 2026
In the Budongo forest of Uganda, primatologist Elodie Freymann spends her days watching chimpanzees eat, and writing down exactly what they choose. Not the everyday feeding - the odd choices. A chimp that is off colour will seek out a plant it otherwise ignores, and her job is to catch the moment and identify the species. She is trained as a botanist and social anthropologist as well as a primatologist, which tells you how many kinds of knowing this work asks for.
The discipline is zoopharmacognosy - animal, medicine, knowledge. The word was coined in the late 1980s, after researchers working through the late seventies and eighties established that chimpanzees were deliberately selecting plants that rid them of internal parasite infections. They were the first species documented doing it. Over the nineties and early two-thousands the same behaviour turned up in other animals, and the last few years have brought another surge of researchers.
Bottlenose dolphins in the Red Sea rub against corals with antifungal and antibacterial properties. Male great bustards in Spain eat antiparasitic plants in the mating season, apparently to clear their parasite load before the costly business of displaying. Bears, elephants, civets, snow geese - the list lengthens every year, and each addition came from someone watching one animal long enough to notice it doing something out of the ordinary.
None of this is news to everyone. Indigenous communities and traditional healers had watched animals treat themselves long before science gave the behaviour a Greek name; what the last few decades added is documentation, chemistry and a frame for asking harder questions. How much of the behaviour is instinct and how much is learned, passed down the generations the way ours is? And how far do other species' medicine cabinets overlap with our own?
Humans have been browsing the same pharmacy for a while - the medicinal fungus found on Ötzi the iceman, dead these five thousand years, suggests as much. Freymann's wager is that it was always open, to every species with the patience to learn it. What the work asks of a researcher, in the end, is not brilliance but duration. You cannot hurry a chimpanzee into being ill in front of you.
Keep a sickness diary for the animals you keep or watch: what each one ate in the days before it recovered, and what it refused. Herders and healers built working pharmacopoeias from exactly these notes; a notebook, a pencil and one full grazing season is the whole instrument.
Bioneers · Read the source