Out of the frying pan, into the fire

Bora has brought my attention to a paper about one of my top favorite animals of all time: the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus). These are truly amazing animals. They are one of the most unique canid species, but the literature on them is relatively sparse. This paper actually happens to be in The Condor, an ornithology journal, which must be why I haven't come across it before while combing journals for maned wolf papers.

The title is fairly self-explanatory: Hunting Association between the Aplomado Falcon (Falco femoralis) and the Maned Wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) in Emas National Park, Central Brazil .

The study shows that aplomado falcons (Falco femoralis) can benefit from keeping an eye on maned wolves while they forage. Apparently the falcons often prey on birds that the wolves flush out of hiding. It isn't great for the birds, which are in an "out of the frying pan into the fire" situation, evading capture by the wolves only to end up in the talons of a falcon.

This is interesting for a couple of different reasons. I'm not sure it qualifies as mutualistic, since there isn't an obvious benefit to the wolves it seems more like commensalism. This doesn't make it any less of a significant symbiotic interaction, however: the fact that they facilitate hunting opportunities for the falcons is an example of how these wolves play an important part in their ecosystem.

Example: The wolves are involved in a complex symbiotic relationship with their main food source, lobeira fruits (Solanum lycocarpum) and several species of invertebrate animals. They act as important seed dispersers for these plants, and in return they obtain antihelminthic substances from the fruits. What is fascinating is that they preferentially deposit their feces on the mounds of leaf-cutter ants. The ants take the seeds from the feces, process them, and then eject them from the nest. It has been shown that seeds which have been digested by the wolves and then processed by the ants have much higher germination success than control seeds. It is very common to find a lobeira plant growing out of the top of an ant colony.

You could extend this web of interaction farther if you involved the bees that act as pollinators, the fungus gardens that the ants cultivate (the fungus produces antibacterial compounds that protect the seeds from decay), etc etc.

It is a fascinating system, but a tenuous one as well, as more and more of the cerrado is destroyed, disrupting cycles of plant growth/seed deposition that take many years to complete. Also, even though wolf populations are protected within some national parks in Brazil, this has led to an increase in scavenging human trash, reducing normal feeding behaviors and thus the entire cycle based on the wolves' diets and habits.

Anyway, that turned into a long tangent in a post that is supposed to be about falcons and wolves. Aplomado falcons have very specialized hunting behaviors even without their "wolf watching" habits: they hunt in cooperative pairs (read a great eyewitness account here), with tightly coordinated movements and flight patterns.

This is my favorite kind of science story: I never ever lose my sense of awe at the complexity of interactions and complementary ecologies of different species. The wolf and falcon make great "conservation icons" to try and garner support for protecting habitat that houses thousands of species, but even the ants, fungus, etc plays a crucial role . . . when you start piling up extinctions, you never know which organism might be the straw that breaks the camel's back, the keystone, insert your favorite cliche here but the message is that there is no such thing as an isolated incident in nature.

To conclude, just for fun I wanted to put up a shot of two of the subjects of my research for my undergrad honors thesis: Keifer and Elmer, they're brothers, and in this picture they are very interested in the banana that another keeper was munching on!

EDIT/NOTE: Stay tuned for another maned wolf post in the near future. I didn't have the time or space here to go into some of the really fascinating features of the biology and ecology of this species, there is much more to tell!



Leandro Silveira, Anah T. A. Jacomo, Flavio H. G. Rodrigues, Peter G. Crawshaw, Jr. 1997. Hunting Association between the Aplomado Falcon (Falco femoralis) and the Maned Wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) in Emas National Park, Central Brazil.
The Condor 99: 201-202

Hat-tips to Bora and the Russlings blog for bringing the falcon paper to my attention!

(Falcon image credit)