Animals that are 'crazy' about heat

WHEN, in early January, the Department of Medical and Veterinary Sciences of Bologna was notified that a wolf had been found in the Apennines with a torn throat, in a settlement of accounts between males, in a moment it became clear that something absolutely new and impressive had been consumed. Until then, there had never been anything like it that season. The right time had always been the end of winter. From what world is the world, the wolves go into conflict then, to assume the Alpha position of dominant male, the only one allowed to reproduce. They do it instinctively, because getting a female pregnant too early exposes the young to the risk of hunger.

Wolves know that nature doesn't give food endlessly. For this reason, they allow only one male of the pack to reproduce. This winter, all of a sudden, this precaution had fallen. November and December had been so hot that the wolves had lost their temper. They set off hormonal storms two months early, exposing future offspring to the risk of extermination. Nature has been experiencing a monstrous jet-lag for weeks, the results of which we will soon see the results, if there is snow in February and March. There's no need to be born when there's no food.

The wolf's body spoke of a perfect execution. The animal had died as it had always killed, in its hunting career: with a single blow to the jugular. A bite that makes you dry as a gunshot. He was an adult who had been under surveillance for some time with infrared visors. They had named him 'Othello. '

He had impregnated his last female ('Desdemona') the previous spring. Now the other males had gotten it out of the way, because among wolves it is not allowed for a leader to be weak and supremacy is won by killing the old king. Everything was in the rules. Everything except the season.

The students of Professor Mauro Delogu, the department's leading researcher, took the beast downstream for an autopsy and immediately the impressive bite was seen. Torn muscles, broken vertebrae. Perhaps it had been a collective execution. You could tell by the hair that Othello had tried to submit, going belly up in the air. But that wasn't enough, and then he had fought to the end. Now he was there, skinned, with his powerful violet muscles open on an anatomical table. Dissected, one of the molars said its age: twelve years. A patriarch, who survived twelve winters.

I saw the living images of that fantastic creature. The footage of the passages in the woods, the sinuous and light step, the photos of the pinched jaw, the old scars, the recordings of the howls together with the puppies, slow, fluttered, supernatural, creepy. I witnessed the triumph and fall of a king. But it was a normal tragedy in nature. The real drama was elsewhere, in time. “I'm 50 years old and this year I witnessed something I've never seen,” Delogu explains. “The animals have gone crazy, the blackbirds sang their love songs already in December and now their young are in danger of coming out of their eggs when there are still no insects or caterpillars around. Here we worry if there is no snow in Cortina or there is high water in Venice, and we do not see the magnitude of a drama that sends the entire food chain into crisis.”

Paolo Zucca, a veterinary researcher from Trieste, a specialist in birds of prey sought after by Arabian hemian-falconers, is 43 years old and says he has never heard, since he knew the birds, the spring song of greenfinches in December. “A few sunny days are not enough to change the animals' hormonal structure, larger changes are needed. What we are observing as ethologists and wildlife medicine experts indicates that the modifications during autumn-winter 2011 were of such magnitude as to change the physiology of the Italian fauna. Keeping in mind that this phenomenon is very risky for species, we can say that we are faced with changes at an advanced stage. In short, we are already in it in a big way. Animals rarely make mistakes, and this time they're wrong en masse.”

Delogu has just returned from Siberia where this year, instead of minus forty, he has dropped only to minus twelve, and he confirms that he is facing an enormous mutation. “Magpies put their nests back in place normally in March. This year they have been there since before Christmas. Thousands of species are suddenly at risk of extinction. Individuals built from a selection of millions of years are now leaving the planet. The serious thing is that species that have also determined our evolution are disappearing. If we are erect, fast and armed, it is also because of the fear of animals such as the wolf. And what about the plants: oaks, cherries, black alders, walnuts, their seeds must spend a time below zero otherwise they will not germinate, and this time the real winter has not yet been seen on earth”.

The laboratory at the University of Bologna is full of stuffed animals: wild boars, otters, birds of prey, partridges and grouse. Almost all of them were collected and prepared by Delogu himself, in a hunt for the wonders of the Ark that began already on elementary school desks. Sometimes it indicates extinct or endangered species that were widespread when he was still a teenager. “Look at this butterfly on the bulletin board, it's called Zerinzia. It lives exclusively on a ditch grass called Aristochia. If it reproduces before that grass appears, the caterpillars no longer find food and the species disappears.” He adds: “It makes an effect to point the finger at something that no longer exists. These bulletin boards are full of animals that won't make it.”

The mutation has been going on for years. In winter, Siberian ducks and geese no longer descend to Puglia but stop in Poland and Germany. Green parrots have invaded Italy and with them the North African monarch butterfly. Turtles, barracuda, triggerfish and others come from the Red Sea. People say: who cares. And he's wrong. Without more climate barriers, new species can carry tropical viruses with them and attack us. The barracuda can mow down the blue fish that has been a component of our nutrition for millennia. “Having a monarch butterfly next to us is exactly the same as finding a zebra in Milan.”

This snowless winter exposes the white partridge and the white hare to predatory capture. Their camouflage color, acquired thousands of years ago, has become an implacable beacon for some years. The white on gray or brown stands out for miles. The hunters know it, and the Peregrine Falcon knows it, who, if it sees a white pigeon in the middle of a flock of another color, it will catch that pigeon and not others. Since the Middle Ages, the nobles trained their falcons using the white pigeon as their prey.

Nature's clock is tilted. Birds such as swifts, pure insectivores, happen to arrive in Italy before there are insects to eat. “Last year in Bologna - says Delogu - we collected hundreds of sticks on the streets.” Meanwhile, in this disaster, the most adaptable animals emerge. The mice. Starlings, who eat anything. Royal gulls, who party in landfills up to 2500 meters above sea level. Delogu caresses his stuffed animals and smiles: “We are up to our necks in it. And who knows if one day, in a few centuries, an astronaut will come to the planet and on a bulletin board he will indicate, among the extinct species, even one of us”.

by Paolo Rumiz, taken from www.republica.it