When Santa’s exhausted reindeer finally set down their sleigh in the deep snow of the North Pole early Christmas morning, it’s not Rudolph’s radiant red nose that will help them find sustenance in the barren landscape.
The findings help explain the long-standing scientific mystery as to why reindeer can see light in the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum—and add intrigue to the smiling airborne ungulates popularized in the classic story by 1926 Dartmouth graduate Robert L. May.
“Reindeer are so cool, but many people think about them only at Christmas,” Nathaniel Dominy, first author of the study and the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth, says. “Now is a good time to alert people to their extraordinary visual system.”
Reindeer subsist primarily on reindeer moss, or Cladonia rangiferina, which isn’t a moss but actually a species of algae-fungus fusion known as lichen. C. rangiferina forms thick, crunchy carpets across northern latitudes and is so integral to the survival of reindeer that even its formal name stems from the scientific term for reindeer, Rangifer.
The researchers worked in the Cairngorms mountains in the Scottish Highlands, which host Britain’s only reindeer herd—reintroduced from Scandinavia after being hunted to extinction locally—and more than 1,500 species of lichen. Despite these options, reindeer in the Cairngorms rely on C. rangiferina during the winter.
2023-12-15 22:00:04
Article from phys.org rnrn