Numbat: The 20,000-Termite Tongue

At 10:15 AM in Dryandra Woodland, a numbat named Jarra snaps up her 6,500th termite without digging so much as a pawful of dirt. The numbat’s tongue, measuring nearly four inches, flicks out up to 100 times every minute, glistening with a gluey, saliva-like coating no other marsupial produces. Jarra weighs barely one pound, yet by noon her tally is over 10,000 termites, each lapped up from open logs and narrow crevices-never an underground mound. Termites close their mounds at the hottest part of midday, so Jarra’s entire hunting routine is pressed into a frantic window between sunrise and one o’clock sharp. Other insectivores rely on brute force or burrowing claws, but Jarra’s survival lives and dies with her tongue and the dryness of her patch of bush. As temperatures close in on 90 degrees, her count climbs past 19,000, every termite swept in by the slot-shaped jaws and bristly papillae lining her tongue’s edge. By sunset, Jarra has cleared 20,000 termites from her territory-never once digging, always racing-a number that means an adult numbat must spend all daylight hours, every day, just to stay alive in the termite clockwork of Western Australia.