The Aardvark and the Termite.

This summer in South West France has not been its usual hot balmy self. In fact as I look out the window now the overriding colour is a deep lush green. Normally by July it is turning a straw yellow colour but this year we have had plenty of rain. In contrast, to the south of us, fires have been raging through Portugal, Spain and South Eastern France. Who knows if this is a taste of what’s to come or a one year glitch in the system but one thing is for sure climate change is going to affect life on this planet in both subtle and not so subtle ways.

I wrote about termites last week and their importance in the ecosystem. This week I read a disturbing news article about aardvark, who of course survives on eating termites and ants.

A group of scientists in South Africa were studying aardvarks in the Kalahari. They had inserted biologgers into several aardvarks in order to follow their activity and body temperature. It turned out that the year of their study was an exceptional year of draught and all but one of the study animals along with others in the area died. They unexpectedly recorded a phenomenon not seen before that should be an eye opener to the ways in which future climate could affect not only individual species but whole ecosystems.

The aardvark themselves can withstand high temperatures but the termites on which they rely for food and water cannot. With the information provided by the biologgers the scientific team where able to see that the aardvark were not finding enough termites or ants to keep their energy levels up. Night times can be pretty cold in the Kalahari and the team found that the starving aardvark even swapped their usual night time foraging behaviour to day time in order to conserve body energy. They were even seen sunbathing in a bid to save energy. It seems that none of this adaptive behaviour was enough. There simply was not enough food for their needs and they slowly starved to death. At an average weight of 60 to 80 kg an aardvark is a large animal and needs to eat around 50 000 termites or ants a night.

One or two bad years will always happen but if climate change shifts as it is predicted many areas of Africa will become drier and hotter creating an aridity that most of the native termites and ants cannot tolerate. True, given time, more tolerant species may take over but in the meantime the much loved aardvark may become a creature of the past. But that is not the end of the story. The aardvark is more than just a curiously put together animal, it is the architect of large burrow systems that many other mammals, birds and reptiles are reliant on to escape extremes of hot and cold weather, to bring up their young and escape from predators. Most cannot excavate the hard earth themselves so with the possible demise of aardvark life would get a whole lot tougher for many many more animals.

If you want to read more about the study have a look at this link https://africageographic.com/blog/aardvarks-beating-climate-change/