An Ethiopian wolf has been filmed licking a flower, suggesting the carnivore may act as a giant ground-bound bee.
The shaggy red wolves slither from flower to flower, slapping the sweet stickyness of the flowers, their white noses yellowing with the pollen of the bright red poker flowers.
So Sandra Rai, an ecologist at the University of Oxford, and her team suspect that strict carnivores are spreading the pollen. Kniphofia foliosa Plant it on another plant to create an Ethiopian wolf (canis mensis) the first example of a large carnivore pollinator.
“Wolves were observed foraging for nectar in flowers.” K. Foliosa “Flowers deposit relatively large amounts of pollen on their muzzles, suggesting that they may contribute to pollination,” the research team said. written in their paperexplains that further research is needed to confirm successful pollination.
A video provided in the supplementary information to a very interesting paper by Lai and co-authors published in the journal Ecology shows the potential for pollination of Kniphofia foliosa by Ethiopian wolves. 🐺
Read here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/…
@pollinet.bsky.social
— FLOWer Lab 🌸🍒 🐝 🪰🔬🧬 (@flowerlab.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 9:41 PM
If they do help fertilize flowers, then endangered wolves would join an exclusive but endearing group of flightless mammals that pollinate plants. An example of something called philosophically including rodents, primate, shrew and honey possum (Tarcippes rostratus) – the only completely nectarivorous mammal that is not a bat.
Through years of field research, Lai and his colleagues noticed that wolves sometimes prefer sugar. To find out more, they tracked six different wolves from different packs over four days.
“The first time I became aware of Ethiopian red hot poker nectar was when I saw shepherd children in the Bale Mountains licking the flowers.” explain says Claudio Cirello, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. “Soon I tasted it myself. The honey had a pleasant sweetness.”
During the study, the researchers observed a single wolf visiting up to 30 flowers in a single intrusion.
Flowers that rely on mammalian pollination tend to be hardy or have special adaptations, and red hot poker is no exception. Its flowers, known as racemes, cluster around the head and grow on stems that extend up to 1 meter (about 3 feet) from the ground.
almost 90 percent Many of Earth’s flowering plants rely on animals for pollination, and these discoveries suggest that the role of little-known pollinators may be larger than we realize. Suggests.
Most mammals involved in pollination are usually small to medium-sized and usually arboreal, such as bats and sugar gliders. The fox-colored wolf stands out because the few other carnivorous mammals known to feed on flower nectar are small-bodied species like civets and raccoon relatives.
With fewer than 500 Ethiopian wolves left in the wild, they are Africa’s most endangered carnivore.
Like many of the most endangered species on the planet, this unique wolf has a specialized diet, feeding on certain rodents, primarily found in the mountainous regions of Africa, followed by a treat. It is thought that they are eating flower desserts. Like their main prey, wolves are found only in seven mountain ranges above 3,000 meters above sea level.
genetics suggests These wolves are the remaining ancestral group of the canid lineage that eventually became the gray wolf.
The researchers hope to confirm whether pollination actually occurs and investigate whether there is evidence of coevolution between this unusual pair.
“These findings highlight how much we still have to learn about one of the world’s most threatened carnivores.” say Lai.
This research ecology.
