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Head to linode.com/scishow to learn more and get a $100 60-day credit  on a new Linode account. [♪ INTRO] Nature is full of substances and materials  with the potential to treat illness and injury. And humans aren’t the only  ones who have figured that out.

Many animals exhibit behaviors  that are thought to involve using a natural product to  cause some desired effect. It can be tough to determine exactly  why an animal is doing something though. So we look for them eating or  outwardly applying some material to increase their chance of survival, but only when they have a specific problem For example, lizards eat roots that  appear to counteract snake venom, and fruit flies may lay their eggs in certain  plants to protect their babies from wasps.

Still, our inferences are always circumstantial. But things got more interesting this week when a German research team  announced that they’ve observed a new form of self-medication  in wild chimpanzees in Gabon. That alone isn’t surprising – it’s  how the chimps do it that’s new.

Researchers observed chimps catching  insects and putting them on open wounds. Over a fifteen-month period, the  scientists documented 22 instances of the chimps putting insects on a wound, and most of them played out exactly the same way. The ape would catch a flying insect, immobilize  it by squeezing it between their lips, place it on a wound and move it  around, then fish it out of the wound.

The researchers think doing this might have  an anti-inflammatory or antiseptic benefit. In three of the observations, though,  the researchers saw something special. The chimpanzees were applying  insects to another chimp’s wounds.

And not just to their kids or siblings, but  to totally unrelated members of the group. In one case, three other chimpanzees helped out. It’s worth noting that the researchers  don’t yet know what beneficial properties these insects might have, or even  what kinds of insects were used.

I guess it’s hard to get close  enough to see what kind of bug an ape is catching without like bothering the ape. It’s possible that it’s more of a cultural  practice specific to this group of chimps than something with a specific biological benefit, though that would still be super  interesting for the researchers studying their social dynamics. If no other chimp groups display  this behavior, that would be a clue.

Medicating other individuals seems to  be an example of a prosocial behavior, or action that benefits another individual. Humans engage in prosocial behaviors  out of empathy and concern for others, but there’s a lot of debate  over whether other species are prosocial for the same reason. In this case, helping an unrelated  individual with wound care doesn’t seem like it provides  much benefit to the helper, so it might be a great tool to help  scientists learn more about what drives members of non-human species  to help each other out.

The researchers plan to study the social  aspects of insect wound treatment, looking at who gives and receives  treatment, how new chimps learn to use insects on wounds in the first place, and whether the bugs have  any pharmaceutical benefit. That could tell us a lot about  prosocial behavior in chimpanzees, and even about the evolution and drivers  of prosocial behavior in general. But now, we turn to a community of  animals with substantially fewer brains.

A paper published this week  in Nature Communications looked into how communities of sea sponges  in the central Arctic Ocean survive. Sponges often live in really dense  groups called sponge grounds. And because sponges are filter  feeders, these sponge grounds tend to crop up in areas with  a lot of carbon in the water, because more carbon means more of the  organic material that the sponges eat.

The sponge ground on the Langseth  Ridge in the Central Arctic Ocean is about 330 kilometers south of the North Pole. It is the densest and most northerly  sponge ground ever discovered. And researchers were scratching their  heads about how it could be there at all.

It’s usually covered in sea ice, and algae  in the sea ice don’t produce much carbon. Not enough to support a huge sponge community. The sponges live on underwater  mountains formed by volcanoes, which sometimes release things like methane, but these mountains are totally inactive.

So scientists had no idea what  they were actually eating. So they measured the amount of  carbon and nitrogen in the sponges and compared them to possible food sources. They combined that information  with seafloor mapping to get a better sense of how the area  could provide for so many sponges.

And They found that under the sponges, the mountain peaks were covered in  tubes left behind by tube worms. Which would track, because those worms  tend to live in places where gasses like methane seep out – but again, the mountains aren’t active,  and the worms are not alive. Any more, that is.

The carbon and nitrogen samples of sponge  tissue actually matched samples of the tubes, which suggests that that is where  they’re getting those elements. From dead tube worms. The sponges are sustaining themselves  on a completely extinct ecosystem.

An ecosystem of methane seeps and tube worms that had been extinct for thousands of years. Sponges are hugely important  to underwater ecosystems, because they provide places  for other species to live. They also filter water, which  affects the availability of nutrients and other particles cycling in the water.

And the scientists think that’s what’s  happening in the Langseth Ridge. Microscopic sponge parts mix with the empty worm  tubes to form a dense mat across the mountain top. That mat, and the sponges themselves,  provide a home to a bunch of microbes.

The microbes chow down on the old tubes and break the nutrients in them down into  tiny pieces that dissolve in the water. Then the sponges filter the water  and get all that good stuff. As bizarre as this ecosystem is, it’s  important to understand how it works.

The sea-ice in the area is rapidly melting and that change is going to be a big shock   to all of the critters that have made  a home there for thousands of years. And conservationists can’t protect ecosystems if they don’t understand how they work. So hopefully learning how sponges survive and thrive on an extinct  ecosystem might actually keep the new ecosystem from going extinct too.

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