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Black-backed jackals may urinate on sweet melons that grow in the Namib desert to stop other jackals pinching the fruit as it ripens.

The jackals, which are native to eastern and southern Africa, hunt small prey or scavenge on the carcasses left by larger predators, but they are also partial to fruit.

at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and his colleagues set up camera traps to study the role that black-backed jackals (Canis mesomelas) play in spreading the seeds of the !nara plant (Acanthosicyos horridus).

The melon-like !nara fruits have sweet and juicy flesh and can weigh up to a kilogram each. They have sustained wildlife and humans 鈥� especially members of the Topnaar community 鈥� for millennia, but until now it wasn鈥檛 clear who or what was responsible for dispersing their seeds across the desert.

Jackals have the jaws to chew through the fruit鈥檚 tough skin and, crucially, the noses to find it.

鈥淥ur research has shown they are highly motivated to locate, choose and consume !nara,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e obtained so many videos of jackals visiting !nara plants and fruit that it is clearly not an opportunistic feeding strategy.鈥�

During their experiments, the research team buried 55 melons, both ripe and unripe, in the sand up to 100 metres away from !nara plants. Jackals found every one of them.

Jackals would sometimes partially excavate the fruit, urinate on them and then leave them for a few days before retrieving them.

By urinating on the fruit, the jackals may be trying to declare ownership or to mask their smell as the fruit ripens, thereby denying other jackals the chance to track them down, says Midgley.

The jackals mostly visited the plants at night, and produced droppings filled with undamaged seeds. The team found these seeds germinated more successfully than those extracted directly from ripe fruit.

The droppings of oryx, donkeys and cattle, which also eat the melons, were found to contain no seeds at all because the herbivores鈥� large molar teeth had crushed them.

鈥淚t has long been known that carnivores may consume fruit, such as bears eating berries, but there has been little evidence of carnivores being primary [seed] dispersers,鈥� says Midgley.