Antisocial Aardvarks

Aardvarks are not social and only get together during the breeding season. 

Picture from Wikipedia

Due to their solitary, nocturnal lifestyle, not much is known about their mating or about the rearing of their offspring. After a 7 month gestation, one young is born, usually in October or November. The young is about 6 pounds at the time of birth. By 6 months of age, the young aardvark is capable of finding its own food and will leave its mother to dig its own burrow.

Hungry, Hungry Aardvark?

You remember the game Hungry, Hungry Hippos?  You try to make your hippo gobble up as much food as possible while playing.  Well, the game's creator should have named it 'Hungry, Hungry Aardvarks' instead, considering the aardvark can eat 50,000 termites in one sitting!

Termites must be to the aardvark, what Lay's potato chips are to humans...you can't eat just one!

Meet the Aardwolf

Although its name makes it sound like a combination of an aardvark and a wolf, the aardwolf is actually a type of hyena that lives in two distinct ranges in southern and eastern Africa.

Photo: Dominik Käuferle

At only about 30lbs, aardwolves are much smaller than other hyenas and are only a little larger than an average fox. Their peculiar name comes from their feeding habits. Aardwolves feed almost exclusively on termites, using their long and sticky tongues to root them out of the ground. Although they will rarely hunt small birds and mammals, termites make up over 90% of the aardwolf’s diet; a single animal can consume up to 300,000 of them in a night!

Unlike other hyenas, aardwolves are actually beneficial to farmers. They aren’t attracted to carrion, they’re too small to kill livestock and their copious termite consumption helps control insect populations. Though their population is small and their range is extremely limited, aardwolves are not in decline and are not currently considered threatened.

The Laotian Rock Rat - Living Fossil

Happy Monday, everybody! After a week spent talking about sharks I figured it might be nice to focus on an animal today that most likely won’t ever get a minute on television, despite making a comeback after a vacation of at least a few million years! Meet the Laotian rock rat: living fossil.

Animals and plants that are considered to be living fossils are those that are nearly identical to a species only known from fossilized remains with no other living relatives. Cockroaches and aardvarks are two commonly known animals that are referred to as living fossils. The recently discovered Laotian rock rat may fit this description as well, but there is some debate.

Discovered in Laos in the late 1990’s, the Laotian rock rat was first thought to be so distinct from all living rodents that it was placed in a new family called Laonastidae. However, in 2006 this classification was debated by biologists and it was instead suggested that the Laotian rock rat is a relative of members of the ancient Diatomyidae family which has been extinct for 11 million years. The rat is commonly placed in this family now. If this is indeed the case, the Laotian rock rat would join sixteen other mammals that were once thought to be extinct only to be rediscovered, though none have been thought extinct for nearly this long. This type of occurrence is known as a Lazarus taxon.

The Laotian rock rat appears different from other living rats. Despite the similar appearance and coloring of its body, it has the long and bushy tail of a squirrel. Most are about 15 inches in length with a third of that coming from the tail and a weight of about a pound. These rats have thus far only been found in the Khammouan Province of Laos. Though little is yet known about this newly-discovered species, their limited range and pressure from trapping has led the ICUN to label them as endangered. 

"Earth Pig"

This animal is not from Australian, but reminds me of a weird cross of a bandicoot and a kangaroo. Aardvarks live in Africa. Their name came from the Afrikaans/Dutch for "earth pig," though they are not related to pigs at all.

Speaking of weird, Aardvark’s teeth aren’t protected by enamel, so they are continually worn away and continually regrowing.

Aardvarks can weigh up to 145 pounds (65 kg) and be 7.2 feet (2.2 meters) long. Yikes, that’s pretty big for a creature that lives by eating ants and termites.

Jungle Jane