Parched Kalahari killing off aardvarks

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 switched 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.

“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.”

Weyer said daytime sightings were becoming more common, and her research proved that drought was the reason.

She and her colleagues studied the animals at Tswalu, a Northern Cape reserve, monitored body temperature and activity and linked it to the drought by studying vegetation changes using satellite images.

Wits senior lecturer Robyn Hetem said: “It is getting hotter and drier, and the current and future changes to our climate might be too much for the aardvarks to bear.”