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.
To measure in detail how numbats’ bodies heat up in varied environmental conditions, the researchers slowly drove around two nature reserves near Perth, recording numbats’ surface temperature using a thermal imaging camera fitted with a telephoto lens. Over 2020 and 2021, the team recorded numbats with the thermal camera on 50 occasions. Of those numbat sightings, 62 percent were spotted in the sunshine.