Wombats don’t deliberately offer shelter to other animals in their burrows which can be very extensive. There might be 90 metres of tunnels with up to 30 entrances and the temperature inside these boroughs can be about 10°C below surface temperatures.
The question arises because of a news media story that went viral and which was innocently enhanced by Greenpeace that wombats were ‘herding’ animals into their burrows to protect them against the deadly bushfires that raged across much of Australia in 2020. The story painted a picture of extraordinary courage by this modest marsupial and a great act of altruism but I’m afraid it wasn’t true. It was so viral that a tweet about it garnered nearly a quarter of a million likes.
A fact check by some wise people allowed them to discover that wombats don’t herd other animals but they do seem to allow other animals access to their extensive boroughs when required as happened in these bushfires.
So there is a kernel of truth in that viral social media story. The burrows that they make are quite big as well because they are a big marsupial as the picture on this page shows. The common wombat can weigh 35 kg which is about the size of a large labrador dog. And they have a great talent for digging.
Scientific literature tells us that there are reports of creatures such as mice to large lizards and birds taking refuge in their burrows.
Wombats are the only species of animal which indirectly provides this service. Researchers studied the tunnels dug by the gopher tortoise a species native to the US and they found that there were signs that during wildfires that they serve a flame-proof bunkers for animals.
Wombats provide a similar service. One researcher, Dale Nimmo, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia, together with his colleague Grant Linley, a PhD student at the same university carried out their own study in Woomargama National Park, New South Wales.
They carried out the research for a year after their selected area had been burned in the deadly and devastating 2019-2020 wildfires described as a “Black Summer”. These fires killed an estimated 3 billion native vertebrates. They also killed more than 30 people and tens of thousands of farm animals.
It’s been suggested that these wildfires were so intense that they were enhanced by global warming. Australia’s actions in mining and selling coal to coal powered electricity generating stations in China, are contributing to global warming and therefore it is ironic and very sad that they quite possibly contributed to those devastating wildfires and yet at the same time blamed the feral cat for killing far fewer animals. I’m afraid to say that it is the human who kills more animals than feral cats in Australia.
Nimmo and Linley discovered that it was highly plausible that wombat burrows “might help different species survive and recover [under these wildfire conditions].”
They analysed nearly 750,000 images and found that several species of animal were more active around the burrows compared to nearby control sites according to The Times report that I’m reading.
These animals included monitor lizards, birds including the painted button quails and the gray shrike thrush, and rats. They concluded that this suggested that “common wombat burrows are crucial post-fire refuges”.
A wider story is that wombats perform a service to the broader ecosystem. They do this by excavating subterranean habitats that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Linley said that “These structures are not only fire-resistant but can also last decades, potentially withstanding multiple fires, providing refuge for multiple generations of species. With climate change driving increasingly large and more severe fires, the roles of common wombats, along with their burrows, as vital components of the ecosystem are expected to become even more crucial.”
Wombats are marsupials. In fact, they’re among the largest burrowing marsupials in the world. Other familiar marsupials include kangaroos and koalas. One interesting difference wombats have from many other marsupials is that their pouch faces backward which helps keep dirt out while they’re digging.
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