The flame-colored blooms of the Ethiopian red hot poker grow around mountain-rimmed meadows, as high up as 13,000 feet above sea level. The dry season snuffs out the poker's flowers, leaving the plant parched and yellow. But in the rainy season, the plants first regrow their spiky leaves, then their towering stem, and finally their red-hot flowers. "They look like hundreds of fire torches covering the landscape," Sandra Lai, a senior scientist at Oxford University's Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Program, or EWCP, wrote in an email.
The EWCP monitors the population of Ethiopian wolves, which look like wolves cosplaying as foxes and roam the high mountains on either side of the Great Rift Valley. There are fewer than 500 adult Ethiopian wolves left, rendering the species the rarest canid in the world.
When Lai first joined the program, her colleagues told her she had to taste the nectar of the Ethiopian red hot pokers. Locals know and love the nectar, swirling it into coffee or smearing it on kita, Ethiopian flatbread. Children don't even bother with such preparation, instead licking the nectar straight from their fingers. "It is very, very sweet, quite sticky," Lai said. "Like watered-down honey."
For many years, EWCP monitors had observed the wolves licking the flower's nectar too, right from the bloom. Lai wanted to see the behavior for herself, which she and colleagues recently documented in the journal Ecology. "It wasn’t a planned study," she said. "We simply found it remarkable: a nectar-loving wolf!"
Watching the wolves in the field required patience. The wolves live in close-knit family packs and defend their territories, where they forage for rodents emerging from the ground. Fields of red hot pokers grow in the territory of certain packs. But seeing the wolves requires driving out to the flowers, hiding out in a car and waiting to see if a wolf decides to come, Lai said. Adrien Lesaffre, a wildlife photographer and expert tracker, led the observations in the paper. But the researchers were lucky: wolves came to lick the nectar every day for four days.
Lesaffre observed six wolves, who spent between a minute and an hour and a half in the flower fields. Four of the wolves visited just a handful of flowers. But the other two consecutively visited 20 and 30 flowers in a single visit to the flower patch. "It means it's significant for them, rather than just an occasional opportunistic thing," Lai said. When the wolves left, their muzzles were dusted with the buttery pollen.
Although birds, bees, and other flying animals may be the most obvious pollinators, wings are not a prerequisite for the job. In South Africa, small rodents such as gerbils pollinate the dazzling blooms of proteas. In Brazil, a tiny tree frog might help pollinate the milk fruit tree. And in Colombia, brown rats may help pollinate the feijoa plant. But these pollinators are generally small and often omnivores, so nectar may be a part of their diet.
Wolves, on the other hand, are carnivores. The term generally refers to an animal that eats mainly meat, but it can also refer to any member of the order Carnivora—Latin for "flesh devourers"—such as cats, dogs, bears, seals, and, hyenas. (Some of the members of Carnivora are omnivores, such as bears raccoons.) Using the second definition, the Ethiopian wolf is now the first-ever large carnivore known to feed on nectar. The behavior is surprising in many ways. Nectar-feeding animals often have specialized adaptations to collect the substance, such as a long thin tongue or specialized snout. "Most flowers produce too little nectar to be interesting for large animals," Lai said, adding that they'd need to spend a lot of energy for such a tiny taste. But the abundance and easy access of the red hot pokers means the wolves don't have to go out of their way for a taste.
Why would an otherwise flesh-hungry wolf want a lick of nectar? Lai suspects the wolves have the same desires as us: a sweet treat and a little boost of energy.
In a technical sense, the wolves seem to be pollinating the flowers—that is, transferring pollen from one flower to another. But are they actually helping the red hot pokers reproduce? Many flowers are too delicate to be pollinated by large mammals, which may damage them with their strength and heft. The red hot pokers, however, are relatively sturdy. "Wolves carry lots of pollen on their muzzle," Lai said. "I don't think it would be impossible for them to act as pollinators," she added.
But it is unclear if the wolves are functional pollinators, meaning they actually transfer pollen from one flower to another to result in fruiting. The researchers have yet to test this, as the process would likely take years. But Lai thinks documenting all the visitors of the red hot pokers, flying and non-flying, would be a good start. The researchers hypothesize that these different pollinators might work together to spread pollen in different ways: flying animals would be better at enabling gene flow between different, distant populations, and flightless animals would help a local population conserve its genes. Nectar feeding and pollination by flightless mammals may be more widespread and significant to ecosystems than scientists previously thought, Lai said. This behavior might be happening in the species we thought we knew well; we only have to look.
"Watching a wolf move from flower to flower like a busy little bee was such a captivating natural history story," Lai said. There are only 99 packs of Ethiopian wolves remaining, and each faces threats from habitat loss, vehicles, and diseases from domestic dogs. Perhaps no one is more deserving of a sweet treat.
