Details
Orycteropus afer
The aardvark is the sole living member of the order Tubulidentata, an African mammal often called a living fossil. With its long snout, oversized ears, and spade-like claws, it is a specialist digger that lives almost entirely on ants and termites.
Map: Ecoregions 2017 © RESOLVE (CC BY 4.0) · Natural Earth (PD)
It ranges widely across sub-Saharan Africa, from Ethiopia south to the Cape, inhabiting savannas, grasslands, open woodland, and bushland. It favors areas rich in ants and termites and avoids swamp forest and rocky ground.
Body length runs about 100-130 cm and weight 40-82 kg, with a stout, strongly arched back. The pale yellowish-grey coat is often stained reddish-brown by soil; the long ears, tubular snout, sticky tongue, and powerful spade-shaped claws are unmistakable. It has no incisors or canines, retaining only cement-covered cheek teeth.
Nocturnal and solitary, it spends the day in dark, self-dug burrows and forages at night, covering 2-5 km and occasionally close to 30 km. A formidable excavator, it can dig a yard of tunnel in roughly five minutes and is also a capable swimmer.
It feeds almost exclusively on ants and termites, switching to ants in the dry season and termites in the wet. Locating nests by smell and hearing, it rips them open with strong claws and laps up the insects with its long, sticky tongue, taking tens of thousands in a single night.
After a gestation of about seven months a female bears a single young, rarely two, weighing under 2 kg. The cub shelters in the mother's burrow, begins digging its own around six months of age, and reaches sexual maturity at about two years.
The IUCN lists the aardvark as Least Concern, as its vast range keeps overall threat low. Locally, however, it is sensitive to drought: when dry spells cut termite numbers the animals can suffer heavily, raising concern over the effects of a changing climate.
