bromance

Fossas Are the Original Bro Mammals

Photo: Frans Lanting/Corbis

Nothing human bros love more than chortling and doling out bro slaps while scarfing a tasty meal of hamburgers. But other “hypercarnivores” (creatures with diets that are more than 70 percent meat) are usually loners. Wolf packs of one.

But there’s a meat-eating mammal having hella bromances on this slamming island of Madagascar. Fossas look like a sweet combination of a cat and a dachshund and a recent study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology found that these creatures can spend their whole lives with a best friend, brother, or main brah. They like living on coasts, and their species name (“ferox”) means fierce in Latin.

A study from Germany’s University of Göttingen found male fossas traveling ranges “that extensively overlapped” with other males. Of the nine males studied, three pairs of males hung out for several years and had a “significantly positive dynamic interaction.” One didn’t stop traveling together until one of them died. “We assume male associations in fossas to be of a long-term or even permanent nature,” the researchers write. Chill as hell.

What benefit, besides a cool friend, does this bromance bring to the fossa? It’s all about gettin’ swoll and snagging hotties. If they pair up to hunt, they can eat more. Larger fossas “enjoy greater mating success than solitary males during peak female fertility,” the researchers report. The female fossas hang solo.

Human bros and bro fossas: brother species. There should be an exchange.  I will trade all six dozen frat houses for four of these fossa creatures.

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Fossas Are the Original Bro Mammals