Black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) Photo by By flowcomm – Black-backed jackal and kill, Masai Mara, Kenya, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124789073
First up, I’ve been lucky enough to see Black-backed Jackals in South Africa and Kenya, and they have always struck me as intelligent and wily scavengers and predators. It’s not altogether surprising, then, to find that they have found a way to prevent their favourite fruit, the !nara melon, from being eaten by other jackals. These are mighty fruits weighing up to a kilogram, and few animals are able to break into them. Jackals can, however, and when they find a likely fruit they pee on it and then leave it for a few days before coming back to retrieve it. Scientist Jeremy Midgeley, of the University of Cape Town, set up camera traps in the Namib desert and watched as the jackals actively sought out the fruit. Their droppings are full of the seeds of the melon, which shows that, unlikely as it seems, jackals are a rare carnivorous ‘vector’ for the distribution of the plant.
Why pee on the !nara, though? Midgeley thinks that it could either be to claim ownership of the fruit, or to disguise its smell as it ripens. And in case you think the ! is a typo, it’s because the ! is a ‘click’ sound in the Khoisan language of the people who named the plant. Apparently it sounds rather like the ‘tsk’ sound that English folk make when confronted with some minor inconvenience, such as the supermarket being sold out of crumpets, or the Northern line having three Charing Cross trains in a row when you want one that goes via Bank. Not that either of these are personal examples, of course.
You can read the whole article here.
Next! Look at this little guy! This is a Brazilian Flea Toad, and s/he’s about the size of a pea, making them the smallest vertebrate animal yet recorded at about 7 millimetres long. There was some dispute with the closest previous contender, a Papua New Guinea frog, but the adult male Brazilian Flea Toad (actually a frog, to add to the confusion) is a whole millimetre shorter. Scientist Mirco Solé at the University of Santa Cruz in Brazil thinks that there could be even smaller frogs out there. In the photo below, the coin measures 27 millimetres across.
Photo by Renato Gaiga from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2416854-brazilian-flea-toad-may-be-the-worlds-smallest-vertebrate/
And finally, as regular readers will know I’m a great cephalopod fan so I was not altogether surprised to see that the Andrea cuttlefish (Sepia andreana) uses its ink to make an impressive breeding display. First he caresses the female cuttlefish with his unusually long ‘arms’, while bombarding her with dense blobs of ink – scientist Arata Nakayama of Tokyo University thinks that this might be to spook the female and persuade her to sit still. But then, after some of the usual cuttlefish tricks of changing colour and displaying pulsating bands of light and dark, the male cuttlefish emits a big cloud of ink and burst through flamboyantly. You can almost hear him saying ‘Ta-Dah!’
And here is a film of the whole thing. It’s clearest from 59 seconds in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ka7kR31aQI
You can read the whole article here. It’s just extraordinary what we’re finding out about these animals.
Black-backed jackals count among my favourite animals in the wild.