Making Medicine Out of Millipedes

up a giant millipede. The creature began alternating between chewing on the noxious critter and massaging it into the fur around her tail and sex organs. Finally, she gobbled the arthropod down. As Peckre watched, the lemur then found two more millipedes and went through the routine all over again. By the time she was finished, the lemur's bottom half was visibly soaked with a frothy mix of saliva and the arthropod's electric orange secretions. Later that day, she witnessed five more lemurs from two separate groups perform the same bizarre behavior. The animals hadn't previously been witnessed eating these animals, or, of course, rubbing them all over. What did it all mean? It's too soon to say for sure, says Peckre, who is studying lemur communication at the German Primate Center. But in a paper published this week in the journal Primates, she and her coauthors make a compelling case that the red-fronted lemurs may be using the millipede secretions to self-medicate against intestinal parasites. To understand why the red-fronted lemurs might rub toxins on their genitals, first you have to understand that this species harbors a greater variety of gastrointestinal parasites than any other lemur species. What's more, some…