Drought is killing aardvarks in southern Africa’s driest areas, Wits University conservationists said on Wednesday.
The nocturnal creatures, which survive on ants and termites, had adapted by switching to daytime feeding to conserve energy, the scientists said in the journal Frontiers in Physiology.
But Nora Weyer, who monitored aardvarks in the Kalahari for three years as part of her PhD research, said the change was not enough to save the long-nosed foragers, because their food supply vanished.
“It was heartbreaking to watch our aardvarks waste away as they starved,” she said. “Unfortunately, the future looks grim for Kalahari aardvarks and the animals that use their burrows. Tackling climate change is key, but there is no quick fix.”
Aardvarks occur across most of sub-Saharan Africa but few people have seen one because they are solitary, mostly nocturnal, and live in burrows.
Weyer said daytime sightings were becoming more common, particularly in winter when the animals wanted to avoid being outside during cold nights, and her research proved that drought was the reason.
She and her colleagues studied the animals at Tswalu, a reserve in the Northern Cape, monitored body temperature and activity and linked it to the drought by studying vegetation changes with the help of satellite imagery.
Wits senior lecturer Robyn Hetem said: “We needed a long-term, comprehensive data set to confirm that it really was drought causing this unusual behaviour.”
By shifting their activity from the cold nights to warm days during dry winter months, aardvarks can save some of the energy needed to keep their body temperatures up.
But those energy savings were not enough to see the aardvarks through a particularly bad drought in which many died, said Weyer.
“Aardvarks have coped with the Kalahari’s harsh environment in the past, but it is getting hotter and drier, and the current and future changes to our climate might be too much for the aardvarks to bear,” she said.
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