Ethiopian Wolf (Canis simensis) Photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66000167

Dear Readers, when we think about pollinators, I’m sure most of us think about bees, but actually the range of animals that can transfer pollen from one flower to another is much, much wider – not just other insects (beetles, hoverflies, wasps), but also birds (and on this subject there’s a very interesting new study by Jeff Ollerton, which suggest that bird pollination is much commoner than we think) and bats. Pollen is also sometimes transferred by small mammals who are nectar feeders, particularly some of the little marsupials. But a new report is thought to be the first observation of a large mammal being involved in pollination.

The Ethiopian Wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest dog in the world – there are thought to be less than 500 individual animals left. They live in the Bales Mountains of Ethiopia, and scientist Sandra Lai and her colleagues at the University of Oxford watched as the wolves licked the nectar from the Ethiopian Red Hot Poker flowers – these plants are so sweet that local people use the nectar as a sweetener for coffee. The snouts of the wolves ended up covered in pollen, and they feasted on as many as thirty plants per day. Not only that, they also brought their cubs to the flower fields.

Ethiopian wolf flower-feeding (Photo Adrien Leasaffre via New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2457336-nectar-loving-ethiopian-wolves-may-be-the-first-carnivore-pollinators/)

Studies like this always make me wonder what else we’re missing – for the longest time no one realised that blue tits were feeding on the flowers of crown fritillaries, for example. It’s true that bears sometimes seek out plants with nectar, but they don’t seem to seek them out systematically, whilst it’s clear that the Ethiopian wolves do. And what beautiful animals they are!

Photo by Nik Borrow at https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikborrow/39027505831

You can read the New Scientist article here, and the full paper here.