Important news update! All the reports of this are look how adorably misguided the baby hippo is for being scared of little birds that are just trying to help clean it! Its like Calvin not wanting to take a bath, but that baby has legit reason to be freaking out: Oxpeckers are notorious vampires. Excluding oxpeckers resulted in significantly fewer wounds on experimental oxen in all treatments, and all but one of those wounds healed in less than a week. None of the wounds recurred in subsequent weeks. Oxen with oxpeckers, by contrast, not only had a higher proportion of wounds that persisted or recurred, they also had a higher number of wounds overall.... Deliberately inflicted or not, wound feeding is unlikely to be beneficial to the host mammal. It is hard, however, to quantify the possible fitness costs, or offset these costs against potential tick reduction benefits. The only evidence I have for this is the case of an oxen that had a tick bite on its sheath. The bite was first enlarged and then fed on regularly by oxpeckers for several weeks, eventually developing a swollen infection that prevented the ox from attaining an erection. It is hard to imagine a more direct blow to the fitness prospects of an animal. ...oxpeckers are, for instance, parasitic on hippopotami (where they seem to feed exclusively on wounds (via beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/2/154.full )
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 02:16:32 +0000
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