Aardwolf
Proteles cristatus
— Where the name comes from
Proteles is “complete in front”, from the Greek prōtos and téleios: it has five toes on the forefeet and four behind, and the name records this. Cristatus is Latin, for the erectile mane along the back which it raises when threatened, doubling its own outline. In Afrikaans it is the aardwolf, “earth wolf”, and that is the name by which it is known everywhere.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Dry savannah and open grassland, where Trinervitermes termites abound
- Range
- Eastern and southern Africa, in two separate populations
- Size
- 55–80 cm of body, 8–12 kg
- Diet
- Insectivore — almost nothing but termites of the genus Trinervitermes
- Lifespan
- About 13 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It can eat 200,000–300,000 termites in a night, licking them up with a sticky tongue.
- 02
Its molars have shrunk to blunt pegs: it no longer needs them for chewing.
- 03
It is a hyena, though it weighs a tenth of a spotted hyena.
— What sets it apart
It is a hyena that has given up biting. The other hyenas have the most powerful jaws of any land carnivore and crack buffalo femurs; the aardwolf, descended from the same stock, has let its teeth wither into useless pegs and specialised everything else — tongue, saliva, stomach — on a single genus of termite that nothing else eats, because it secretes a chemical poison that only the aardwolf tolerates. Within one family, brute force and its total renunciation.
