The aardvark, a highlight for anyone on a game-viewing African safari, will become increasingly rare as the world warms and dries, and the consequences go well beyond a decline in aardvark safari encounters.
The aardvark, a highlight for anyone on a game-viewing African safari, will become increasingly rare as the world warms and dries, and the consequences go well beyond a decline in aardvark safari encounters.
According to researchers studying this elusive mammal, sometimes classed as one of the “Shy 5”, in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert, aardvarks prove to be highly susceptible to the warmer and drier climates that are predicted for the western parts of southern Africa, in the future. During the study of a number of aardvarks by researchers of the Brain Function Research Group at the University of the Witwatersrand, all but one of the study animals – as well as other aardvarks in the area – died because of a severe drought, with air temperatures much higher than normal and very dry soil in the area.
“While unusual now, those are the conditions that climate change is likely to bring as the new normal,” says Professor Andrea Fuller, the Research Group’s director.
Dr Benjamin Rey studied the aardvarks as part of his postdoctoral studies. Along with his colleagues, he used the new technology of “biologgers” (miniature sensors attached to computer chips and implanted into the aardvarks by wildlife veterinarians), to study the activity patterns and body temperatures of aardvarks living in the Kalahari. The researchers were not to know that during the year of their study there would be a severe drought, which led to the death of the study animals.
Read more at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Photo credit: Louise Joubert via Wikimedia Commons
