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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCamera traps capture fantastically bizarre animal behavior in South African park
Cat-like genet spends many evenings riding buffalo, rhinos, by Morgan Erickson-Davis
Cowbirds ride cattle to pick off their parasites; egrets pal around with wildebeest and eat the small creatures disturbed by their grazing. But mammals riding other mammals is something long-thought pretty much isolated to humans and their domestic creatures. Then, earlier this month, a camera trap in a park in South Africa captured something that contradicts this assumption: a genet riding around on giant herbivores.
Conservationists working with the organization Wildlife Act set up camera traps in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park to non-invasively monitor the parks wildlife. The park is home to a wide variety of species, including Africas Big Five: rhinos, elephants, buffalo, lions, and leopards.
The photos show the genet (Genetta genetta) entering the scene from the right atop a buffalo. However, the buffalo appears to dislike the arrangement and shakes it off. Undeterred, the genet reappears in another photo on the back of another buffalo, this one more tolerant of a small spotted hitchhiker, allowing it to stay onboard.
Then, in the same night, the genet was captured again at the same photo trap sites this time aboard a rhino. And on another rhino three nights later. And another the night after that. And again four nights later.
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malaise
(269,157 posts)Rec
dewsgirl
(14,961 posts)herding cats
(19,566 posts)I ran across it when I was reading another article about this interesting specimen.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)hunters all
MuseRider
(34,115 posts)of barn cats that rode on the backs of my horses from time to time. I don't think we know the half of what goes on and all these years we pigeonholed every creature like we knew everything about them and as dumber than we are and beneath us. The longer I live out here on the farm and watch the critters the more I learn.