I'll try to be delicate about this, if I can, but maybe you'd rather wait and read this later, if right now you are spooning Wheat Chex or pork sausage down your neck. I don't often delve into topics like this, but I thought I would give you the poop on cougars.
And that is: they are terrific at gardening. I mean, really, maybe you think you do a lot of planting and seeding and fertilizing and weeding, but do you plant 94,000 seeds a year?
Ecologists have figured out that apex predators such as cougars (apex predators are the big guys and women at the top of a local food chain, with no natural predators) do two things very well, besides issuing blood-curdling howls. They kill and eat plant-eaters, which allows the plant population to flourish.
AND scientists now say that they are the type of meateaters that do something else to keep the world green. Let's see:
- they eat smaller animals who have eaten seed-bearing fruits and veggies
- those seeds wind up inside the cougar
- being regular, the cougar also expels the seeds via what top zoologists and third-graders call their "poop"
- those seeds grow!
Even though they are encouraged to visit the salad bar, cougars are actually "hypercarnivores.” They have such a need for protein that their diets tend to be mostly meat. So whatever plants they chow down on are plants that were eaten by someone else first.
José Hernán Sarasola is a biologist who, with his team, spent months collecting and analyzing cougar meadow muffins in Argentina’s Parque Luro Natural Reserve, where the cats get a lot of eared doves for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The team (we hope that they all wore gloves) picked their way through 123 cougar pies and found 32,000 seeds that had been breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the doves. They planted these seeds, and they sprouted nicely, proving that a trip through the alimentary canal of a cougar doesn't hurt their viability.
So as the cougars dash and dine and drop deuces all over, seeds colonize new areas, and those previously lacking in plant growth. And that's good for everyone who eats outdoors and has fur.
That covers a lot of area. Cougars live from British Columbia down to southernmost Chile, which makes them the most widespread mammal in the Western Hemisphere. And all over the world, seed-eating birds are on the menu in most ecosystems, and big felines are, in turn, having them for dinner, shall we say, so big cats are keeping the entire planet green!
Go ahead and have your granola now.
2 comments:
Seeds' alimentary adventures have also played a role in the development of our early societies. Early hunter-gatherer humans stumbled onto the idea of selective crop breeding when they noticed, for example, that sweet almond trees, unlike the bitter ones they passed on when foraging, were sprouting near their latrines. Their culinary preferences indirectly led to the sharper among them realizing that a trip through their digestive tracts was not a necessary part of the path from a sweet almond to a new sweet almond tree. Poof voila, agriculture!
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