An adult male warthog is a fierce-looking animal with large curving tusks and a muscular body.
But once in a while, these pigs like to be pampered.
An article in the latest issue of Suiform Soundings — a newsletter published by the IUCN/SSC Specialist Groups for Wild Pigs, Peccaries, and Hippos — described an unusual interspecies relationship that has developed in the Mweya Peninsula in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda.
Andrew Plumptre, a conservation biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, writes about warthogs in the park approaching groups of mongooses. The mongooses proceed to climb all over the warthog and groom for ticks. The warthog benefits from having its ticks removed, and the mongooses get a meal.
Such mutually beneficial relationships uncommonly occur between species in mammals, though they are often observed in other animals. Many are familiar with the cleaner fish, known to remove and eat parasites from larger “client” fish, for example.
The mongooses at the park are very used to being around people because they have habituated by researchers studying them in the park for over 20 years, Plumptre writes. Likewise, the warthogs are comfortable around humans because of high tourism in the park. This leads Plumptre to question whether this partnership between mongooses and warthogs is actually common phenomenon in the wild that normally goes unseen because it is hard to get close enough to these animals.
Footage of one warthog’s trip to the mongoose spa was featured in an episode of the BBC series “Band of Brothers.”
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