These three rare mammals can all be described as unusual looking. So one might wonder if odd body plan, at least to human observers, is a predictor or correlate of rarity. I asked Carly about the link between countenance and ecology of giant armadillos, giant anteaters, and maned wolves and what it might tell us about rarity. Her answers had as much to do with the energetic balance of these mammals as with their appearance.
“Even though these creatures eat different things, they specialize on food items that just don’t support high densities of big mammals,” she responded. This, not appearance, is key. Giant anteaters and giant armadillos are equipped to feed on ants and termites. While their food resource is ubiquitous, it is also of low nutritional quality (with some exceptions, such as fat-filled winged termites). The physiological and behavioral adaptations of these animals to their food resources may account for both their looks and their rarity in nature.
Giant anteaters have low metabolic rates relative to their body size. One consequence of their slo-mo lifestyle is that they produce only a single offspring at a time and only every other year. They occur at their highest-known densities in grasslands where their food resources are concentrated. But even here, anteater populations are severely constrained by the wildfires that regularly burn through. So even where their favorite foods—ants and termites—are highly concentrated, giant anteater populations are often knocked back by killer fires racing across the pampas.
Maned wolves, which are restricted to the grasslands of central South America, also occur at naturally low densities, half of our two-part condition of rarity. The maned wolf is the largest canid that does not hunt prey larger than itself. Its body mass may well be the limit at which a canid is able to survive on small prey—primarily rodents, birds, and armadillos, heavily supplemented with fruit. To meet their dietary demands, maned wolves traditionally forage across large home ranges of about 70 square kilometers, thus contributing to their natural rarity.
These unique adaptations—the elongated, toothless skull of the giant anteater that accommodates its extra-long ant-lapping tongue; the large claws of the burrowing giant armadillo, used for ripping open termite mounds; the fox-on-stilts appearance of the maned wolf—can be viewed in a new light. These striking features are all the evolutionary products of highly specialized feeding behaviors. Might they be unfavorable attributes in a changing world? An intense specialization on a highly patchy food source, such as termite mounds, works only if the species in question—in this case an anteater—can move effectively between patches. Thus, if the species is to thrive here in the Cerrado, surrounding ranchers would need to keep the termite mounds in their cattle pastures and anteaters would need corridors to reach these patches of rich termite concentrations. The long legs of the maned wolf might allow it to travel long distances easily and pounce effectively on its abundant prey. Being a medium-sized predator but basically subsisting on abundant small mammals such as rats means that you could find your principal food source in any open habitat. Natural selection may have no foresight, but it seems to have left the maned wolf a better chance of survival than the other members of the Cerrado trio.
Before heading out in the morning, Carly checked her data sheets and GPS unit and strapped on her snake guards. She counted the bottles of drinking water on hand for us and Mason, and we set out. When we reached her starting point on the transect, Carly released Mason with the command “Let’s go to work!” Nose and tail in the air—the posture of a skilled scent dog—Mason trotted off into the grass.
The scent dog weaved back and forth across the route, off leash but always within sight of Carly. Within minutes, he came running back to fetch us. Then he raced back into a grassy area under some trees and sat down with his nose pointing a few inches away from a pile of maned wolf dung. Despite being an excellent fieldworker, Carly admitted she would have walked right past this scat had she been on her own. She immediately praised the dog and set about collecting the scat and noting its location on her GPS unit. The Cerrado project marked only the second time scent dogs had been called to duty outside the United States and Canada and the first under the tropical sun. By the end of a six-week pilot study here in 2004, three dog-handler teams had collected more than 650 scat samples from pumas, jaguars, and maned wolves. Their initial success made them believe that this novel technique could work well in the hot Cerrado.
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Add CommentShort answer: no, they can't co-exist when their entire ecosystem is being co-opted for rapidly changing monoculture cultivation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne way we might co-exist with the natural world, not just a few endangered species:
http://5050by2150.wordpress.com
Man's presence may very well be the precursor to the next mass extinction. We have been very busy setting the stage
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfor the big event. As if born to dig up the the remains
of previous existence to repeat the cycle. It may require
a large space rock to save the planet from us. Nature rebooting.