The aardwolf is a hyena that licks up termites instead of hunting
It looks like a small, skinny striped hyena and belongs to the same family, yet the aardwolf has no interest in killing anything bigger than a beetle. Each night it can lap up 250,000 to 300,000 termites with a long sticky tongue tough enough to shrug off their bites.
Its name means earth-wolf in Afrikaans and Dutch, and locals also call it the mane-jackal. The smallest living member of the hyena family, it weighs about 7 to 10 kg and stands 40 to 50 cm at the shoulder, with yellowish fur, black stripes and a long mane it raises to look bigger in a standoff. Unlike other hyenas it has five toes on each front foot, a trait captured in its genus name Proteles, meaning complete in front. Its cheek teeth are built for insects, and the canines it keeps serve mainly for fighting.
Scientists once put it in a family of its own, suspecting it merely mimicked the striped hyena. It is now seen as the earliest-branching of the four living hyena species, though fossils and genetics disagree by 10 million years about when it split off. A 2021 study found eastern and southern animals different enough that American mammalogists now treat them as two species.
Where it lives is dictated by food. It sticks to dry plains and bushland with harvester termites, which thrive on dead grass in heavily grazed land. Rather than tearing open mounds like the aardvark, it licks termites off the ground, finding them by sound and by the scent of soldier termites, and it leaves colonies intact so it can come back months later. It does not eat carrion; an aardwolf hunched over a carcass is picking out larvae and beetles.
Shy and nocturnal, it spends days in burrows, though in the coldest weather it may feed by day. Pairs defend territories of 1 to 4 square kilometres, marking them with a black secretion. Cubs arrive in the rainy season, when termites are busiest, and fathers may guard them for up to six hours a night. Some farmers kill aardwolves believing they take livestock, when in fact the animals eat termites that harm farms.
Source: Aardwolf
