Visitors to the Brazilian church
In 1982, something strange happened in a church in Brazil, their garbage cans are always turned over, but there are no homeless people in the vicinity who come to rummage through the garbage cans in the middle of the night, in order to find the "murderer", the church priests decided to quietly hide behind the door at night to observe.
At nightfall, a strange-looking animal appeared from the night, its appearance looked a bit like a wolfhound, but it was full of golden red, and the white fur on its throat was somewhat like a red fox, but its figure was taller than that of wolves and foxes, and compared to its body, its legs appeared very unreasonablely slender and slender, and its toes were black, as if wearing a black stocking, and its tail was fluffy like a fox.
The priests of the church continued to observe and found that the animal's movements were somewhat strange, and the feet on one side of the body did not alternate between stepping forward, but at the same time protruding forward, as if turning in human words. It approached without hurry, and although it walked "down the road", it had an indescribable elegance.
Suddenly, the two large triangular ears on its head trembled, and then turned its head vigilantly, as if sensing the secret prying eyes of the priests, and without hesitation, it turned its head and ran away. It does not look like a wolf and a fox when it runs, plus the black brown hair on the back of its neck, but more like a galloping horse.
The priests had never seen this strange and beautiful animal before, and since then they have left some clean food at the door, looking forward to its return. Slowly, the animal also began to appear at the church door many times, and then quietly enjoyed this free meal.
This feeding has been more than forty years, and it has become a sightseeing project, and many tourists come to see the animal up close, but the church requires them not to come close, nor to feed it privately. More people came, and the identity of this animal was also exposed, it was the maned wolf.
A vegetarian "wolf"
The maned wolf, also known as the Brazilian wolf, is a strange animal distributed only in South America, with some similar appearance to the red fox, but with four large legs, so it is also called "fox on stilts", it is also the largest in South America, and the highest canine in the world.
Although called the maned wolf, it is actually a distant relative of the wolf, and it is not close to other canines, and cannot even cross with other canines, so they are considered to be the only South American canines that have survived the late Pleistocene extinction.
As the world's tallest canine mane wolf, everyone must be thinking about what great prey it usually hunts, but the truth is shocking. Maned wolves mainly hunt small rodents and mammals such as rats and rabbits, but their favorite food is fruit.
Although wolves are carnivores and occasionally eat vegetarians, the maned wolf with a wolf in its name uses the skill of vegetarianism to the extreme, and in the maned wolf's recipe, more than half of them are all kinds of water and sugar-rich fruits, eating tomatoes and cacti in the rainy season, and mainly eating Brazilian wolf fruits in the dry season - this plant is named after them, the Brazilian wolf fruit is golden, looks like a tomato, but tastes like an eggplant.
Meat is only an after-dinner "dessert" for maned wolves, and even eating too much meat will make them indigestion. In the past, when people first put the maned wolf in the zoo, they didn't know much about it, so they made the mistake of empiricism, treating it as a carnivore like wolves and foxes, feeding some chicken, duck, and fish every day, and as a result, several maned wolves got stones.
Keepers are feeding the maned wolves
In 1999, a pair of maned wolves crossed the ocean to the Shanghai Zoo, they were friendly messengers from Brazil, and they were also the first pair of maned wolves in Asia to raise and exhibit, when people saw the zoo feeding them dog food and fresh fruit, they also felt that the zoo was abusing them, until later after the understanding of maned wolves increased, the misunderstanding was solved.
Asia doesn't have their favorite wolf fruit, but they found another delicious fruit here, the banana, and they, like people, know that the banana peel is not delicious, and only eat the banana meat inside each time. Since the "fox on stilts", the maned wolf has a new nickname "vegetarian wolf". I don't know if the banana wolves who love bananas in the cartoon "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf" are based on them.
A soak of urine alarmed the police
In 2006, the Dutch police received a report that someone was smoking marijuana at the Rotterdam Zoo, and when the police arrived, they did smell the smell of marijuana burning, but they could not find the so-called "marijuana smoker", and later found that the smell of marijuana was actually a maned wolf peeing, and it was marking its territory with urine.
Maned wolves have a strong sense of territory, but their urine smells strange, in their urine, contains a chemical element, some people think this smell is like hops, some people think it is like the smell of cannabis burning, so they are also called "skunk wolves".
In addition to marking territory with urine, the maned wolf will also defecate at the door of the leafcutter ant's nest and form an alternative "symbiosis" with the leafcutter ant. Leafcutter ants are well-known "farm operators" who carry the maned wolf's droppings into their nests as fertilizer to breed a special fungus that is the food of leafcutter ants, which are the only creatures other than humans that grow fungi.
Leaf cutter ants
The maned wolf, which likes to eat vegetarian, has a large number of plant seeds in the feces, and these seeds that cannot be used as fertilizer will be separated by leaf-cutting ants and thrown outside the nest, after such a trip, the germination rate of these seeds has increased significantly, which can provide more food for the maned wolf in the future.
Perhaps because of their vegetarian preference, maned wolves do not need to cooperate to capture large animals, so they are the lone rangers of canines, their partners are relatively fixed, usually sharing a territory, but only during the breeding season can the maned wolf couple be seen living together. After giving birth to the little maned wolf and caring for it for a year, the maned wolf's family will fall apart, the little maned wolf will leave the place of birth to live alone, and the maned wolf couple will be separated and try to avoid each other.
Maned wolves are very shy, they will run away when frightened, and generally do not pose a direct threat to humans, because of their appearance, people used to think that maned wolves would steal poultry or kill cattle and sheep, so they also hunted the maned wolf as an animal, and used their eyes as lucky charms.
But now this view has been proven wrong, and instead, maned wolves hunt some rodents that are harmful to agriculture. The maned wolf has also been listed as a near-threatened species and has received attention, with nature reserves set up in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and other countries to protect this elegant and beautiful animal.
Resources
"A Vegetarian Wolf" Wang Jingjing
"With the Maned Wolf" Zhang Ruoyu