Aardwolf! Proteles cristata! Basically a tiny, insectivorous hyena!
Okay, not really. It’s basically a tiny aardvark with some really terrifying relatives.
And by “tiny,” I mean…well, you remember springhares? Yeah? They appropriate springhare burrows as dens. They weigh like twenty pounds and stand two feet tall. Do you know how big an aardvark gets? Almost two hundred pounds. They’re like seven feet tip-to-tip. They fucking meant it when they named them “earth-pigs.” I don’t know exactly what they were thinking when they named aardwolves “earth-wolves,” but presumably the first few people to say it did so really sarcastically. They’re more like earth-foxes.
So these guys are in the hyena family, which means that, in spite of appearances, they have nothing to do with dogs whatsoever. They’re unusual among hyenas in that they feed almost entirely on insects (specifically harvester termites), with a side order of rare, opportunistic carrion-feeding and small-vertebrate-killing. This, of course, means that they live where the termites live and, as we saw with anteaters, spend the vast majority of their free time eating termites, because termites and ants are fucking tiny, and it takes a lot of them to make a meal.
They also do that same drive-by feeding behavior that anteaters do, so they don’t wind up cashing out any individual mound and leaving themselves with nothing to eat a week from now. Of course, they’re not big or strong enough to just roll up and tear open a mound, which makes it easier to show restraint, but hey. Credit where it’s due. (They will totally just stuff their fucking faces with termites from the same mound that just got ripped to shit by an aardvark, though, so it’s not like they’re saints.) They typically hit the shallower, less-hardened foraging tunnels leading away from the main mound, which doesn’t do nearly so much damage to a colony as wrecking up the joint aardvark-style.
Above: Aardwolf licking termites from a disturbed tunnel like a conscientious predator/chump. With their ridiculous brillo-pad of a tongue. (Below.)
Unlike the classic hyena social structure, aardwolves mostly stick to one monogamish couple and their offspring rather than large clan-style social structures. They cooperate to defend territory and raise their babies, but both males and females will mate outside the pair-bond given half a chance. They also forage separately within their square-mile home patch, so both the one-night stands and territorial defense against intruders occurs on the regular. When they’re pissed off or frightened, they can make those manes on their backs stand up. This makes them look both bigger and a bit more metal than they usually do.
