Numbats are curious creatures. The only marsupials that are active solely during the day, when they scratch at soil and rotting logs for termites, these squirrel-sized animals are built to hoard body heat. But that same energy-saving trait may put the already endangered animals at risk as the climate warms, a new study suggests.
“Climate change means that numbat habitats are becoming hotter and drier, with more extreme heat-wave events,” says Christine Cooper, an environmental physiologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She and her colleague — Philip Withers at the University of Western Australia, also in Perth — wanted to know how higher temperatures might impact the animals, and what that might mean for the numbats’ future conservation.
Numbats (Myrmecobius fasciatus) once ranged across much of the southern half of Australia, but wild individuals are now limited to a handful of small populations in the western part of the country. Habitat loss coupled with introduced cats and red foxes continue to imperil the marsupials, and the species is now considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Add in climate change, and the animals may be increasingly caught between a rock and a hot place: They exclusively eat termites and can forage only during the day when their prey is active. Termites make for a low-cal diet, so the marsupials are adapted to maximize heat gain to save energy they’ll need in cooler temperatures, Cooper says.
2024-01-11 13:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org