Aardwolf

Aardwolf battle analysis

The aardwolf looks like a small, thin striped hyena with a long mane, big ears and slender legs. A typical adult weighs about 10 kg. Despite its name and its family, it is a specialist insect-eater: its cheek teeth are reduced to little pegs, and it feeds by licking harvester termites off the ground with a long, broad, sticky tongue, taking hundreds of thousands in a night.

Its life is tied to those termites. It forages alone through the night at about 1 km per hour, finding termite columns by sound and smell, and in cold southern winters it can lose a fifth of its weight. Pairs share small territories of 1–4 km², mark them with hundreds of scent pastes a night and chase out intruders, and fathers stand guard at the den against jackals.

In a battle context the aardwolf is weak. Its canines are its only real weapons, its bite-force quotient is a fraction of the other hyenas', and it is neither fast nor armored. Its survival relies on bluff: a raised mane that makes it look far larger, a foul anal secretion and a burrow to dive into. It sits near the bottom of the medium-small mammals in Attack and Defense, with its Special score coming from its unusual feeding specialization and defensive display.

Habitat & range

Two separate populations: one in East and Northeast Africa and one in southern Africa, split by wetter woodlands in Zambia and southern Tanzania. It prefers open, grassy plains and savanna with 100–800 mm of rain a year, avoids forest and pure desert, and does not need to drink. It thrives in heavily grazed grassland and farmland where harvester termites are common.

Diet & hunting

Feeds almost entirely on one or a few local species of nasute harvester termites (Trinervitermes), licked from the soil surface as they forage in dense patches. In southern African winters it switches to the pigmented harvester termite Hodotermes, and in the East African rains to other termites. It does not destroy mounds, so colonies keep supplying food. In the Serengeti aardwolves and aardvarks overlap heavily in space and time, and aardwolves appear to benefit from aardvark activity.

Social life

Socially monogamous pairs with their latest offspring share a territory of about 1–4 km², marked with anal-gland paste. Young stay about a year and leave around the time the next litter is born.

Conservation

Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. Most southern African aardwolves live on farmland, where the main threat is indirect poisoning from pesticide spraying against locusts; other threats are persecution by people who mistake it for a livestock predator, dogs trained to hunt jackals, roads and drought. Camera trapping in southern Tanzania estimated 9.2–13.3 aardwolves per 100 km².

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