If all tastes are in nature, this one is not common, because most flowers are too fragile for most carnivores who would want to suck the nectar. This requires a long tongue or a specialized snout. But that didn’t stop the Ethiopian wolf (A simian dog) to get used to lapping up the local red flowers of the Kniphofias family (or “Satan’s embers”).
The pollen of this Kniphofia foliosa which then sticks to its snout has a good chance of being transferred to neighboring flowers: the wolf can in fact “taste” up to 30 in a single visit, according to observations reported on November 19 in the journal Ecology.
Biologists have suggested in the past that some bears are capable of sucking nectar, but these are rare and “poorly documented” cases, says lead author Sandra Lai of Oxford University, which justifies to make this wolf “the first large carnivore” to have added nectar to its diet.
The wolf in question is on the endangered species list. It is only found in the highlands of Ethiopia, where fewer than 500 individuals remain. This is what pushes these researchers and others to study its way of life, as part of a protection program dedicated to it.
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