Caught between a fox and a hard place. (Photo by Helenabella)
On top of having a great name, the numbat is a lovely, unique Australian marsupial, and the only living member of its family. It too was almost destroyed, but is being slowly pulled back from the brink of oblivion.
The numbat is also known as the banded anteater, so-called because it has stripes on its back and because the men who discovered it in the early 1800s saw that it had a long tongue for its size, and assumed it must be a type of anteater. In fact it does not eat ants at all. The numbat’s diet consists of one thing, and one thing only — termites. Termites for breakfast, termites for lunch, and termites for dinner. If it gets a midnight craving, there are leftover termites in the fridge.
Even though it is a relatively small creature, about a foot to a foot and a half long, its voracious appetite for termites knows no bounds. An adult numbat will eat up to 20,000 termites per day, which, well, as far as minds go, this boggles them.
Termites are fairly nutritious, but there’s not much to them, and because of this the numbat has a very weak jaw and lots of tiny, useless teeth that it doesn’t even use. You don’t need to be able to chew to eat a termite; they are soft and small.
Yet the numbat is actually not very well-adapted for an all-termite diet. Many animals that are specialized for termites are larger creatures with strong digging claws to rip into a termite mound, and with a very long tongue for reaching down into the depths of the colony. The numbat has very ineffectual claws that can only reach termites near the surface, and its tongue, while long and sticky for an animal of this size, is not nearly long enough to get deep into a termite mound. In evolutionary terms, the numbat brought a knife to a gunfight.
"That's not a knife." This only works if you say it in an Australian accent, which of course all numbats have. (Photo by Martin Pot)
To make up for this, it synchronizes its own daily schedule with the termites’. When the termites are active, there will be many of them near the surface of the mound, allowing the numbat to get them out with its tongue. In the summer, the numbat feeds through the morning and evening, skipping the afternoon heat; in the winter, when the termites are less active, the numbat feeds for only a few hours in the late morning and early afternoon, and spends the rest of the day saving energy by going into a torpor. You might remember that this is a deliberate state of very low energy use, low body temperature, and low metabolism, like a short-term hibernation.
In addition, the numbat has the best eyesight of any marsupial, which helps it to avoid predators such as snakes and hawks. But this eyesight did not help it when a new type of predator came to Australia.
Numbats were once widespread across western and northern Australia, but that all changed when humans deliberately introduced foxes to the country so that they could have fun fox hunts like they enjoyed in England, because nothing says “refined and noble gentleman” like terrorizing a fox. You’ve heard this story before — the foxes bred, their population grew out of control, and the native wildlife of Australia had no defense against them.
Foxes tore into the numbat population and came within a whisker of destroying every single one. The once-widespread creature survived only in two very small pockets in the extreme southwestern corner of Australia, with only about 1000 individuals remaining. It is thought that they survived here because there were a large number of hollow, fallen logs where the numbats could hide from the foxes.
With the great genocidal fox-numbat war close to its ultimate end, humans stepped back in and tried to protect the numbat. We removed as many foxes as we could from their areas, and their population began to improve. The foxes went on to kill other animals instead, and slowly we have begun to reintroduce the numbat to some other small, fox-free regions. Today the numbat is still endangered, but its prospects have improved. The problem of invasive species in Australia, on the other hand, is far from resolved.
Like all marsupials, the numbat gives birth to very tiny, under-developed young. Numbat babies cling to their mother’s underside, because the numbat is one of the rare marsupials that does not have a pouch. The babies hang on down there and feed while the mother goes about her usual termite-devouring business, and they stay there for almost half a year. At that point they are too big to hang off her underside, and so instead they crawl onto her back and continue to hang out up there for another three months, except when the mother gets tired of them and leaves them in the nest so she can finally eat her 20,000 termites in peace.
The Book of Beasts 