Even Insects Self-Medicate to Fight Parasites | LiveScience
A female monarch butterfly laying eggs on tropical milkweed.
CREDIT: Jaap de RoodeThe use of medicine can no longer be considered a solely human trait, if it ever was. An ever-growing list of animals use various chemicals to self-medicate and to treat peers and offspring, usually to fight off and prevent infection.
And this list runs the gamut, with the usual suspects — primates chewing on medicinal herbs — as well as some more surprising drug-takers, such as fruit flies, ants and butterflies, a new study finds.
Previously, scientists thought such behavior was unique to primates and more [...]
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It's interesting that we acknowledge that animals know what they're doing in this respect, they know what their bodies and their environments require of them, but we, humans, the supposed greatest specie in the universe if you ask a lotta people, are apparently incapable of the same. We need doctors and nutritionists and the government to tell us what to eat, how much, and when, and we ignore the evidence that perhaps they really don't know given that so many people are unhealthy or feel unhealthy, have problems gaining or losing weight ("but I totally eat what I'm supposed to!"), have digestive issues... And equally amazing is the percentage of people I know who eat, drink, and medicate according to their body's dictation (not with pharmaceuticals, though, you really do need a doctor for that as those substances don't occur in nature and should only be used with and according to instructions; a cup of honey lemon tea when we're sick is safe self-medication, anything with a child-proof cap is probably not) who feel healthy most of the time, get over illness quickly and with fewer ill effects, and tend to maintain a healthy weight without a lot of effort. That's one of those things though, the smarter we realize animals are, the harder it's going to be to exert our authority over them as though they were of no consequence (which we're already realizing is very much not the case, since changes in the animal kingdom indicate changes in the environment that will undoubtedly affect us all). Maybe one day we'll get back to eating when we're hungry, drinking when we're thirsty, breathing when we need air, and soaking up some sun when we need a fire lit under our ass. :)
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