The Ethiopian wolf is a reddish-brown solitary hunter found only in the Ethiopian highlands.
“For now, the population is more or less stable,” says Sandra Lai, a senior scientist with the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme and an ecologist at the University of Oxford. “But there are fewer than 500 individuals left.”
Recently, Lai and his colleagues discovered something new about these creatures: The animals occasionally consume nectar from a plant called red poker.
In other words, the carnivorous Ethiopian wolf may also be a pollinator.
A face full of nectar
Every summer and autumn, in parts of Ethiopia, the fiery red flower blooms, setting the tall grasslands ablaze with its clusters of tubular flowers.
“It’s really like torches of fire in the landscape,” Lai says. “To me, it’s colorful like a sunset because it goes from yellow to red. I think it’s very, very beautiful.”
These flowers are loaded with nectar. “You can see children drinking the nectar,” she says. “I’ve tasted it. It’s very sweet. And when you do that, you get pollen all over your face.”
Lai had heard that wolves were sucking nectar from these flowers, and she wanted to see if the rumors were true. Do they go from flower to flower like a busy bee? Her team decided to follow the wolves.
“You really have to go where there are big fields of flowers,” she says. “You wait for a long time. If you’re lucky, a wolf will come.” Lai’s colleague, Adrien Lesaffre, was lucky. Over the course of several days, he spotted and photographed half a dozen wolves feeding on the nectar.
“You have some individuals that seem to be more attracted to nectar than others,” she says. “One thing that was striking was that they could spend a long time — like an hour and a half — foraging on flowers and sometimes visiting up to 20, 30 flowers.”
She says the photographs leave little doubt that wolves love nectar. In one, a red-headed animal has its eyes closed as it stretches its head back to lap up the sweet treat. It almost looks like it’s smiling. In another, an adult and a juvenile forage for nectar together—perhaps, Lai says, an example of how younger wolves learn from older animals.
Finally, in one photo, a wolf looks directly at the camera, its snout covered in pollen. “You see it’s completely yellow,” Lai notes.
This suggests the animal may be transferring pollen from one plant to another as it feeds, meaning this large carnivore, Lai says, could also be a pollinator.
“We still need to confirm it,” she says. “Having a wolf pollinate flowers is something new. I don’t think it’s been reported before.”
A growing cast of pollinating mammals
“It’s really exciting,” says Sandy-Lynn Steenhuisen, an ecologist at the University of the Free State in South Africa who was not involved in the research. “Especially for a carnivore to use these plants as a sugary snack.”
Steenhuisen is curious to know how much energy the wolves are actually getting from the nectar. “They’re only going to be flourishing for a short period of time,” she says. “They’re not going to sustain these large animals with high energy needs.”
Still, Steenhuisen says Ethiopian wolves appear to have joined the ranks of a growing list of mammals likely involved in pollination — bats, mice, squirrels, mongooses, honey possums, giraffes, and more. In other words, the system is intricate.
“There are relationships between plants and animals that we never even knew about or dreamed of,” says Steenhuisen.
Researchers in Ethiopia hope the findings will help inform their efforts to conserve the Ethiopian wolf, preventing further habitat loss and raising the animal’s profile.
“The fact that it is only found in one place in Africa,” says Lai, “makes it a very interesting species to preserve, protect, and observe and admire.
Harri J, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
