A wolf species was unexpectedly caught on video licking flowers in Ethiopia; This suggests that these carnivores may have behaved like ground-bound giant bees. Furry red worms slither from flower to flower, splashing the flower’s sweet stickiness while their white faces are stained yellow by the flower’s angry pollen.

So Oxford University ecologist Sandra Lai and her team suspect that these strict carnivores may be pollinating a single plant. Kniphofia foliosa makes the Ethiopian wolf to the other (Canis simensis) is the first example of a large predatory pollinator.

“We watched how the wolves search for nectar in the flowers K. foliosaTheir snouts deposit relatively large amounts of pollen, suggesting they may have facilitated pollination, the team explained in their paper, explaining that more research is needed to confirm successful pollination.

If they help pollinate flowers, the endangered weevils will join a specialized but fascinating group of flightless mammals that pollinate plants. Examples of so-called therophylia include rodents, primates, mice, and opossums (tarsipes rostratus) are the only fully nectaroid mammals that are not bats. Over years of fieldwork, Lai and his colleagues noticed that wolves had a random addiction to sugar. For further research, they tracked six different wolves from different packs for four days.

“I first learned about the nectar of the Ethiopian hot poker when I saw shepherd boys licking the flowers in the Bale Mountains,” explains Claudio Sillero, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. “I tasted it myself soon after; the nectar was quite sweet.”

Flowers that rely on mammal pollination are often robust or have special adaptations, and angry poker is no exception. The flower clusters, known as panicles, are clustered around the heads, which can grow up to one meter (about 3 feet) above the ground. Almost 90 percent of the world’s flowering plants depend on animals for pollination, and these results suggest that the role of lesser-known pollinators may be greater than we think.

Most mammals that participate in pollination are generally small to medium-sized and usually live in trees, such as bats or sugar gliders. The few other carnivorous mammals known to feed on nectar are small species such as civets or relatives of the raccoon, making the fox-coloured wolf stand out. The Ethiopian wolf numbers fewer than 500 in the wild and is the most threatened carnivore in Africa.

Like many of the world’s most endangered species, this unique wolf is a specialized feeder; It feeds mostly on certain rodents found in the highlands of Africa, possibly followed by a flower dessert as a reward. Like its main prey, the wolf is found only in seven isolated mountain ranges at an altitude of more than 3,000 metres.

Genetics suggest that these wolves are a remnant group of ancestors of the dog lineage that later evolved into gray wolves. The team aims to confirm whether pollination actually occurs and to investigate whether there is evidence of co-evolution between this unusual pair.

“These discoveries underscore how much we still need to learn about one of the world’s most threatened carnivores,” says Lai. This study was published on: Ecology.