Pharmacy in the sea: Dolphins ‘use coral as medicine for skin ailments'
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Loading... - Oliver Smith
- 24 May 2022
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Who doesn’t like a bath scrub? Dolphins definitely do: they are known for being clever, playful, tactile animals, and they like to rub against rough surfaces, nap in coral beds and soak on sponges like guests at an underwater spa.
However, dolphins may be getting more from their bath scrubs than just relaxation and leisure. A study published today suggests that bottlenose dolphins may be self-medicating their skin ailments with the help of corals, adding to growing research on their previously unexplored medicinal properties.
“It’s very intensive,” said Angela Ziltener, one of the study’s lead authors, of the behaviour of the dolphins with particular corals. “They don’t just go through [the coral] – they go up, they come back down again and they rub their belly, their ventral area and the back.”
Dolphins have thick, smooth and resilient skin, but can be prone to skin conditions such as yeast and bacterial infections, scars or tattoo-like lesions caused by viral pox infections. These ailments seem to be exacerbated by global heating.
Ziltener, a wildlife biologist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and her team have been surveying a community of 360 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in the northern Red Sea since 2009. They observed that the dolphins often queued up nose-to-tail to rub themselves against corals as soon as they woke up and right before they went to sleep, as if they were showering for the day. As well as a mechanical rub, the dolphins also caused the corals to release a polyp mucus.
The team also noticed that the dolphins returned to the same coral species, and appeared to be meticulous in choosing which parts of their body to rub. They ran lab tests on 48 samples of corals, sponges and coral mucus “chosen” by the dolphins, including the gorgonian coral Rumphella aggregata, the leather coral Sarcophyton sp. and the sponge Ircinia sp.
The results, published in the journal iScience, revealed at least 17 different bioactive metabolites with antibacterial, antioxidative and oestrogen-like hormonal properties, all of which could be useful in skin treatments.
The compounds are not commonly used in antibiotics for humans or animals, but an expanding body of research shows that some corals and sponges have medicinal properties, including antimicrobial.
“Such metabolites are helpful if you have an infection,” said Gertrud Morlock, an analytical chemist at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany, and a lead author of the study. “If the dolphins have a skin infection, these compounds could have something like a healing property.
“If you think about it, they have no other options. If they have a problem with the skin, what can they do?”
The authors note that further research is needed to show which coral’s medicinal properties the dolphins need to treat given ailments, and whether these properties have a measurable, positive impact on the cetaceans’ health. Read More...
