Elephants Eat the Strangest Things

[xchrom]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2014/07/04/elephants_impalas_dik_diks_and_apples_of_sodom_native_species_are_good_for.html


Impalas gorge on plants that would poison livestock.

The fruits that dangle from Solanum campylacanthum, an indigenous East African shrub, taste awful—like unripened tomato, stinging the tongue with acridity. Locals give them an aptly uninviting name—apples of Sodom—because they are poisonous to people and cattle. S. campylacanthum grows quickly, lately overtaking Kenya’s pasturelands. Getting rid of it is expensive, inefficient work.

Luckily, native herbivores eat the shrubs. Though few herders might welcome the thought of elephants, impalas, or dik-diks (adorable though they are) trampling across fields towards their sheep, these wildlife effectively control S. campylacanthum’s spread, as Robert Pringle of Princeton University and his colleagues report in a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The toxic chemical in S. campylacanthum is benign to these creatures. Pernicious compounds are common in bushes and shrubs, so “browsers” of branched plants have evolved to withstand eating the things “grazers” of grasses (which usually don’t contain such chemicals) cannot. What would spell famine for the domesticated ungulate brings a feast for many an untamed beast, as captured by camera footage from the researchers’ study: @ link

[TeeYiYi]

1. Elephants eat impalas?

TYY

Hi xchrom. Next time I'll actually read the story before commenting.

[xchrom]

2. ...