Tag: Scavengers

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Hell’s Kitchen Houdinis of Hotdogs by Douglas J. Lanzo

pavement ants hoist
bacon bits and sauerkraut
along sidewalk cracks
as we savor hot dogs
overloaded with flavor

by Douglas J. Lanzo

Pavement ants are perhaps the most successfully adapted animal species of modern times to New York City.  As the most populous ant species, they outnumber humans in the Big Apple by the ratio of 2,000:1, representing over 50% of the billion plus ants in each of its 5 boroughs.  Just how these aptly named insects thrive through all seasons in NYC is a marvel to behold.

Enamored of greasy foods like hotdogs, pavement ants send scouts out on initially randomized foraging walks to cover as much territory as possible.  With extremely sensitive olfactory receptors on their antennae, they can detect the fat and protein molecules in a hot dog in concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion.  Following windblown hotdog odor plumes, these ants follow “scent gradients”, tracking rising concentrations of scent until they locate the food source.

If you’ve ever been to Manhattan and grabbed a hotdog, chili dog or street taco, you’ll readily appreciate how easy it is for a portion of these overloaded toppings to end up “fragrancing” the city’s streets. Not only are pavement ants masters of locating NYC’s offloaded fast food treats, they are masters at breaking them down into pieces and hoisting them on their waterproof, triple-segmented exoskeleton, weathering wind and rain, back to their queen and larvae for high-energy feeding.  Foraging in groups of hundreds, the scouts leave a trail of pheromones for their worker ants to follow.  Once at the hot dog, worker ants sample the food to determine its quality, and if satisfactory, break it down with their mandibles, digest some of it in their social stomachs and carry the remainder in bits back to their nests, cleverly utilizing sidewalk cracks to avoid being stomped in the process.

Further reading:

To learn more about these remarkably successful fast-food scavengers, and entrancing behavior, check out Episode 2: Food of BBC Earth’s series: New York: America’s Busiest City (2016) or the “60,000 Hot Dogs” Research published Dr. Elsa Youngsteadt, in Global Change Biology (2014), calculating that Manhattan’s arthropods could consume the equivalent of 60,000 hot dogs annually in the Broadway and West Street corridor alone.

Author bio:

Doug is an award-winning American author and poet of over 560 internationally published poems whose debut novel The Year of the Bear won the Ames Award for YA Books and whose second book I Have Lived was named American Book Fest Novella of the Year. His Author’s website is www.douglaslanzo.com.

Check out other sciku by Doug here.

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Fussy Eaters

When it comes to food,
a devil may indeed care.
Picky scavengers.

Scavengers are opportunists, feeding whenever and on whatever they can. If an animal relies primarily on scavenging (instead of hunting) then food is not guaranteed and so it’s important to feed when they can. As a result, scavengers shouldn’t be picky eaters.

Yet recent research by Lewis et al. (2022) suggests that the Tasmanian devil may buck these expectations. The researchers took whisker samples from devils caught around Tasmania and analysed the stable isotopes present in them to determine what the devils had been eating.

Rather than seeing the generalised diet typical of a scavenger, the researchers found that most Tasmanian devils are actually dietary specialists, preferring to feed on specific foods (for example birds, wallabies or possums). Curiously, heavier devils were more likely to show this specialisation in feeding behaviour, although the reasons for this are as yet unknown.

So why are Tasmanian devils different from all other scavengers?

It may be because there are no larger predators to compete with in Tasmania – their main competition is each other. Medium-sized mammals, such as wallabies and possum, are common victims of road collisions which may mean that there’s an abundance of carcasses of these species for devils to choose from, which combined with reduced competition enables dietary specialisation.

Further reading: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ECE3.8338

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Sqeamish ossifrage by John Norwood

Delectable mouse

in defiance, stands to face

sqeamish ossifrage

The ossifrage, more commonly known as the bearded vulture, prefers to feed on dead animals, feeding predominantly on the bone marrow as opposed to the meat. It will on occasion kill living animals, with its main prey being tortoises which it drops onto rocks to break them open.

This haiku celebrates a defiant mouse but was inspired by a secondary meaning. In my study of cryptography, I recently de-crypted a challenge with the solution: ‘the magic words are squeamish ossifrage’ which, as it turns out, is a phrase frequently incorporated into the solution of cryptographic puzzles since 1977.

Further reading: The Magic Words Are Squeamish Ossifrage

John Norwood is a Mechanical Engineer working with Carbon, Inc. to revolutionize how things are made. His interests include old houses, yoga, baking, cryptography, and bluegrass music. You can follow him on Twitter under the handle @pryoga

Enjoyed this sciku? Check out some of John’s other work: Universal truth, The answer is none, God may be defined, With enough data, and Rivers cut corners.