Giggling, sneaky, carrion-scavenging—and good for public health?
More than 300,000 people live in Mekelle, along with more than 100,000 head of livestock, according to the study authors. When residents toss dead chickens, donkeys or cattle into the city’s dump, spotted hyenas come calling. “If you’re walking around in Mekelle at night and you don’t see a hyena, you’re doing something wrong,” says Stanford University graduate student Chinmay Sonawane. Wild game has become scarce in the area, and hyenas make up the difference with dead livestock.
To investigate the possible public health benefits more closely, Sonawane and his colleagues observed hyenas chowing down in the local landfill over 40 nights to learn how much they eat. The researchers then estimated how many cases of anthrax and bovine tuberculosis could spread from contact with animal carcass waste in Mekelle and modeled disease rates with and without hungry hyenas cleaning up.
They found that a single hyena crunches up 983 kilograms of dead livestock a year. In 2019 Mekelle’s roughly 210 hyenas gulped down about 4.2 percent of the available animal carcasses. By doing so, the model suggests, the scavengers prevented three anthrax and two bovine tuberculosis infections in people and 11 anthrax and 129 bovine tuberculosis infections in livestock.
Despite its importance to the ecosystem, scavenging has been studied less than behaviors such as predation, says University of Washington wildlife ecologist Laura Prugh, who was not involved in the study. Prugh says she hopes studies like this one, which explore how scavengers directly benefit humans, “will help motivate people to conserve species that often don’t get the same respect.
Scavengers eat things that would otherwise breed rot and infestation. Yup. This isn’t actually *new*…
There's so many things that work so well together in this world.
Eating natures leftovers to help the local community 🙏🏻
I've seen several similar studies with the same result: nature adapt in surprisingly resilient ways (birds f ex). But humans too, look at how the brain counter damage or 'deficencies'f ex. It's...mind-blowing.. 😉
medlow_clare So would going vegan more to the point.
They want us to be healthy because they are planning to eat us.
It’s almost like God planned things to work together. If man wipes out a necessary part of God’s plan...
See also: the near-total collapse of the vulture population on the Indian sub-continent from the 1980s. Vultures performing a similar role in the food chain.
zwgarth Hungry Gnolls: Prevent the Anthrax
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