I could really do with a drink (Image: Prisma Bildagentur AG / Alamy)

They like their meat, genets and mongooses do, but they also like to wash it down with a slug of flower nectar every now and then.

Sandy-Lynn Steenhuisen, from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and her team set up multiple motion and infrared sensor cameras in the shrubland of the Western Cape, to monitor how mammals interact with the flowers of the sugarbush plant.

Rhabdomys: a frequent visitor to sugarbush plants (Image: Alice Balmer)


There are around 30 species of sugarbush or Protea and they are pollinated by small ground-dwelling mammals, such as rodents and elephant shrews, which the team recorded visiting the flowers, alongside birds.

But the large-spotted genets and Cape grey mongooses were something of a surprise. The genets accounted for around 7 per cent of all recorded visits to the flowers by mammals and bird, and the mongoose for around 4 per cent.

“These genets and mongooses appeared quite keen on the nectar and visited flowers repeatedly, even if it meant climbing a few branches or foraging during light snow,” says Steenhuisen.

Both animals, though, are mainly meat and arthropod eaters, even though they occasionally feed on plants. Steenhuisen thinks they visit flowers for the sugar kick.

Sugary snacks

“These flowers produce nectar containing over 30 per cent sugar by weight, a rich sugary snack for any visitor,” she says.

Her team also observed pollen on the carnivores’ snouts and think the carnivores are pollinating the flowers, so the behaviour benefits both the animals and plants.

Given that their visits to flowers are rare compared with visits of other animals, Petra Wester from the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, thinks these animals only play a minor part in pollination, if at all.

But Steenhuisen says these larger species regularly travel longer distances than small rodents, so they may help disperse pollen further away. “Their home ranges are much larger than those of rodents, the more common visitors to these plants. So, although their visits may be infrequent, they may play a small important part in out-crossing plants far away from each other,” she adds.

The remaining puzzle is what makes the sugarbush flowers so attractive to all these different mammals – rodents, elephant shrews, genets, mongooses – with diets ranging from seeds, insects and meat.

“These unrelated animals have different diets, so it’s a puzzle as to what kind of common attractive signal is being emitted by these plants,” says Steenhuisen.

The flowers have a strong fermented smell, resembling sour milk or cheese. So, she thinks one possibility is that compounds in the smells that signal a source of fermenting sugar or protein may be innately attractive to all these mammals.

Journal reference: African Journal of Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/aje.12225