There is a unique animal in the world that is equally similar to a domestic dog and a red wild fox. At the same time, the legs of this pseudo-fox are not foxes or dogs at all. They are quite long (in relation to the general dimensions of the body) and thin, as if specially adapted for hunting in the grassy and shrubbery thickets of the savannah.
This is a maned wolf. Otherwise, it is also called guara or aguarache. Refers to predators from the canine family. The Latin name of this creature - Chrysocyon brachyurus - in translation sounds like "a golden dog with a short tail."
Description
The height at the withers is quite large, but no more than 87 cm, and the length of the body along with a short tail rarely reaches 130 cm. In the photo of the maned wolf, you can see that high ears, the inside of which is covered with white hair, and elongated, sharp, very similar to fox the muzzle together with such paws create a feeling of grace and some kind of ballet grace. Nevertheless, this is a predator with all the bestial habits that are due to him, and his nature, as the name implies, is really wolfish.
The long, thin and strong legs of this predator are, without a doubt, an evolutionary acquisition. They help him not only to move with good speed along the grassy plain thickets of South American pampas, but to survey the surrounding expanses, looking for prey.
The front limbs of the animal are shorter than the rear, so downhill it runs much faster than it rises.
An interesting fact: the cubs of this wolf are born with short legs. The length of the legs increases due to the subsequent growth of the lower leg. However, the maned wolf is not the best runner. For example, it is not worth comparing the speed of his run with the cheetah.
The general color of the maned wolf is usually reddish yellow. There are dark spots on the body. The part of the neck below the chin and the lower tail fragment are white. The hair is scruffy and on the spine is black, long (up to 12-13 cm), resembles a mane. It can rise if the animal is in an aggressive or anxious state.
The weight of the animal usually does not exceed 22-23 kg.
What is the life expectancy of guars in the wild is still unknown, but in captivity the wolf usually lives from 12 to 15 years.
Behavior
In the afternoon, maned wolves rest, hiding in the grass thickets. Like most predators, they are active at night or at dusk. The flocks do not stray.
These are the so-called "territorial animals" - they live in pairs, each wolf family occupies a plot of about 30 square kilometers. True, “couple” is a conditional concept. The spouses hunt and even rest separately, the male protects the territory from other people's wolves, the female grows puppies.
A maned wolf hunts like this: using sharp hearing, he plans his prey and, getting closer to him, paws on the ground, forcing the victim to give himself out with movement. After that, he bounces completely in fox on straight legs, and, if necessary, chases the victim skipping.
The males communicate with each other with a special throaty bark or with a long, creepy howl at night and at a distance. Faced in the same territory, two males growl at each other.
If several males are placed in one enclosure in the zoo, they will fight until a leader is determined and a hierarchy is established. Further, all individuals usually coexist peacefully, and males even help females care for their offspring.
There were no cases of attacks on a person when he met a maned wolf.
Where does guara live
A maned wolf lives in South America. Once it was found in some areas of Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru and Argentina, but it has long been considered extinct there. Today, the habitat of the maned wolf extends from the end of the Parnaiba River, the largest in northeastern Brazil, to the east of Bolivia.
Favorite places of this animal are thickets of grass and shrubs on the plains, light forests, forest edges and the edges of swamps. In the mountains or areas with dense forests, you are unlikely to meet this animal.
What eats
A maned wolf is not a foodie at all. By virtue of its medium-sized and not particularly powerful data, it hunts small flat animals. In the savannah, these are rabbits, armadillos, agouti, tuco-tuco. A predator can also attack a bird, ravage a nest, eat clutch. Sometimes it catches reptiles, picks up snails and insects. His favorite food, however, remains a wild guinea pig.
If necessary, he digs the earth not with his front paws, but with his teeth. The jaws of this wolf are rather weak - it can neither break the prey nor chew it, which is why it swallows it almost entirely.
Probably for this reason, approximately half of his diet is plant foods: bananas, fruits, sugarcane and tubers of different plants. He eagerly eats one of the nightshade species, which thanks to this even got the name “wolf fruit” among the natives.
In captivity (the zoo in Antwerp, Belgium), a pair of maned wolves eats two pigeons and one kilogram of bananas per brother per day.
Progeny
Females of a maned wolf can bring up to 7 cubs, but usually the litter consists of 2-4 cubs. At birth, the cubs are still blind and deaf, their black coat. Only in 3-3.5 months they will become red like their parents.
Despite the helplessness at birth, the wolf cubs grow quite quickly. On the ninth day, they develop vision. And after three weeks - the ability to eat not only breast milk. Usually, parents feed them at this time, spewing food for them.
Maned wolves become independent sexually mature individuals in a year.
And yet: a wolf or a fox?
The maned wolf with its appearance and habits really looks like some species of half-jackets-half-jackals and the gray American fox from the Americas.
Among fox-like wolves, scientists also know the red wolf, which today in very small quantities lives in India, Mongolia, and Northern Tibet. This is a practically unexplored species. In adults of the red wolf, the appearance has a number of differences from the maned: a black tail, strong small paws and not such a graceful body. Yes, these animals are distinguished by other habits. So to combine the red and maned wolf in one look is impossible.
However, it was proved that the guar, despite the coincidence of a number of noticeable features, hardly has foxes in its “pedigree” - it does not have a vertical pupil uniting these animals. There was also a version that the maned wolf was the ancestor of the warrach (Falkland fox), an extinct species from the Falkland Islands, but it did not justify itself in the course of research.
Currently, scientists have settled on the assumption that this is a relict species, in other words, one of the species that survived the extinction of the oldest canids that lived on the earth in the Pleistocene era (ice age).
Slightly distracted from the topic under discussion, we note that this era ended on our planet about 11.7 thousand years ago. Then, it’s even hard to imagine, animal giants, representatives of the Pleistocene megafauna walked through fields and forests: mammoths, cave lions, woolly rhinos … Marsupial lions and diprodotons (the largest of the known extinct marsupials) lived in Australia.
Finally, we note that the fossil remains of maned wolves are found negligible, hence the many open questions about the origin of this animal.
