© Peter C.A. Köller
Two upright female reindeer gnawing on another female reindeer’s antlers that was bedded down.
About four decades ago, reindeer in the high alpine Nordfjella region of Norway began to engage in a bizarre, new behavior:
They would eat each other's antlers.
Termed osteophagia, the act actually isn't all that rare amongst hoofed mammals. Animals have been known to gnaw on shed antlers to make up for mineral deficiencies in their diets.
However, in this case, reindeer were eating antlers straight off their herdmates' heads!
In 1984, surveys suggested that about 8% of Nordfjella reindeer showed signs of having their antlers gnawed. In 2009, that rate climbed to 72 percent. In a new survey published Thursday to the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research found that 97 percent of reindeer had had their antlers eaten. And that's for both males and females - reindeer and Caribou are the only two members of the
Cervidae (deer) family in which both sexes grow significant antlers.
Adding to the mystery of this rampant antler cannibalization is the fact that all of the roughly 2,000 reindeer in the region are now dead, culled between August 10, 2017 and May 1, 2018 because the herd had become infected by Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a contagious, lethal disease caused by a misfolded form of a normal protein called a prion.
Comment: 2 weeks earlier in the same area: 4 killed, 3 injured in bear attack in Chhattisgarh, India