The maned wolf isn't so much a walking contradiction as a portmanteau creature assembled from parts of other animals says James Fair.
For a start, it isn't a wolf - and it doesn't behave like one. It eats fruit. And, in some locations, it has developed an extraordinary relationship with leafcutter ants.
How big are maned wolves?
Not including the tail, maned wolves are1.2-1.3 metres long and stand 74-78cm tall at the shoulder. They weigh between 20-26kg.
What do maned wolves look like?
In addition to its supermodel legs (and endearing long black socks), this canid's most striking characteristics are its huge ears, mane of charcoal fur and bushy white tail It's often described as a fox on stilts, but that doesn't do it justice.
The individual I'm watching detects something in the rass and launches into a series of short, springy pounces. aping with its two front feet together, gigantic ears inting forwards. There is something playful and cat-like out its behaviour. Like a Dr Seuss character, is this the g that hears like a bat and hunts like a cat?
To find out more, I contact Brazilian maned wolf specialist Rogério Cunha de Paula, who works for Brazil's carnivore conservation body CENAP and in a voluntary capacity, for Instituto Pró-Carnívore (an NGO).
How do maned wolves hunt?
"The maned wolf sometimes relies on sound alone to hunt," he told me. "Its ears amplify the rustles made by rodents and ground birds. Once it has located its prey, it creeps forward slowly, and may tap the ground with its paws to flush out the target. Then it jumps up high, like a serval, and pounces."
Not only is the maned wolf's hunting technique distinctive, it also has the most bizarre gait. John Brown, who filmed the wolf for the BBC'S Andes to Amazon series, tells me that it walks like a camel: "Rather than lifting alternate pairs of legs, as all other canids do, the maned wolf lifts both legs on one side off the ground, then the opposite pair, striking the ground with both feet at almost the same time." This unusual form of locomotion is believed to be an energy-saving technique for travelling long distances.
What do maned wolves eat?
While some of the species' eccentricities are explicable, ates are more mysterious. The maned wolf is a large animal, yet it survives on a diet of small mammals, gro birds lizards, insects and fruit. Lots and lots of fruit.
"Canids of this size are supposed meat-eaters that hunt big game," wrote Louise Emmons, a biologist with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in its magazine Zoogoer.
Emmons has part resolved this dilemma by concluding that maned w are "wolf-like in size, but fox-like in nature". After a foxes also eat fruit at certain times of year. For mar wolves, however, the lobeira fruit is important year-round (obeira is Portuguese for 'plant of the wolf').
The lobeira belongs to the same family as tomatoes (indeed, its fruit resembles a green tomato) and its flesh is said to be similar to that of the aubergine, another member of that clade.
Brown says that it tastes like a bitter avocado, but the wolves clearly love it. Research carried early 1990s by Dr Orin Courtenay, for Oxford's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, found that 85 per cent of maned wolf scats contained lobeira seeds. Today the consensus is that lobeira fruit comprises about half of a wolf's diet.
While a fruit-loving canid is not that unusual, Courtney's next discovery was more surprising. The team noticed that, in undisturbed cerrado, all of the lobeira growing on mounds belonging to one of two leafcutter ants in the genus Atta. The same mounds were also clearly being used by maned wolves as scent-marking posts to demarcate their territories.
Further observation revealed that the ants were dragging the wolf faeces containing lobeira seeds into their nests and then ejecting nearly half of the seeds. The germination success of these rejected seeds - in a nice, fertile mix of ant diggings and faecal matter - was much higher than those scattered elsewhere in the cerrado, Courtenay reported.
Lobeira fruits weigh 300-750g when ripe, so their seed-dispersal agents need to be large. But there are no gorillas or elephants in the cerrado, so maned wolves must be key to the success of the shrubs. The ants presumably also benefit, perhaps using the wolf's faeces to fertilise their subterranean fungus 'gardens'.
It appears to be a beautiful three-way, mutually beneficial relationship: the lobeira ensures that its seeds are dispersed far and wide; the ants have help growing their fungi harvest; and the maned wolves get a tasty meal and possibly more. Courtenay and others have speculated that compounds in the fruit could help to reduce numbers of parasitic worms to which the wolves are vulnerable.
Such 'mutualisms' are invariably more complicated than this, however. While filming the leafcutter ants in action for How Nature Works BBC producer Adam White noticed that the ants separated the seeds from the faeces – a fruitier version of an owl pellet- before ferrying them into their nests.
"Such large seeds are close to the limit of what the ants can carry" he says, "so why do they expend the energy heaving them underground" White speculates that the lobeira seeds may still have small amounts of undigested fruit attached to them, and that's what the ants really want. But nobody really knows why they import both faeces and seeds - nor why they eject so many.
White was filming the ants in Emas National Park, in central Brazil, but the wolf fruit-ant ménage à trois doesn't occur everywhere. For example, he found no evidence of it in Serra da Canastra National Park, an important 70,00oha stronghold for maned wolves in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, yet lobeira bushes Aourish here nonetheless. So it is clear that the dynamics of this relationship are incredibly complex, and we have yet to uncover exactly how each party benefits in this ecological threesome.
It's also worth noting that White's observations of the ants' behaviour appear to contradict Courtenay's, illustrating how little-studied this relationship is. As the latter told me: "It surprises me that nobody has followed any of this up." Perhaps, he suggested, somebody should.
De Paula, meanwhile, feels that the wolf's dependence on lobeira - and therefore relationship with the ants - has been overstated. These plants are common in and around cattle ranches, he says, yet his research suggests that wolves living there are in poorer condition than those in national parks, because they cannot find the full range of foods they require. Indeed in many areas they do not rely on the fruit to survive and have been known to take to take larger prey including six-banded armadillos, weighing up to 6kg and pampas deer of around 40kg.
"We even have records of them preying on crab-eating and hoary foxes," he says. Like humans, wolves need a balanced diet.
Emmons calls Chrysocyon brachyurus the "secret wolf", observing that, even in countries where the species is found, most people have never heard of it. This striking animal is "as tall as an Irish wolfhound" with red fur and a black mane. "How does such a creature go unnoticed?"
However, de Paula says, "Where the species occurs, it is well known". Nevertheless, like most foxes, the species is largely nocturnal. And unlike true wolves (and many other canids), it does not live in social groups, so is hard to spot.
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