Aardvarks find termite mounds mainly by smell, not sight. A strong sense of smell detects colony activity through the mound's outer crust, and hearing picks up movement underneath. A single aardvark can check over 200 mounds in one night, digging into only a fraction of them.
Smell Over Sight: The Primary Sense at Work
An aardvark's eyesight is weak by mammal standards, and that's not a design flaw. Its whole foraging system is built around smell first and hearing second, with vision doing very little of the actual work of finding food across a dark savanna.
The nasal chamber is unusually large relative to body size, and researchers who've examined aardvark skulls count more olfactory turbinate bones, the ridged structures that increase surface area for scent detection, than in almost any other mammal studied. That anatomy lets an aardvark register the specific smell of termite colony activity from several metres away, well before it can see or hear anything.
On a walk near Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa, a field ecologist named Naledi pointed out a mound that looked completely dead to me, grey and cracked on the surface. She said an aardvark would still stop and check it, because smell doesn't care what a mound looks like from the outside. She was right. Twenty minutes later, one did.
Reading a Mound From the Outside
Before committing to dig, an aardvark spends several seconds with its snout pressed close to the mound's surface, moving along the base rather than the peak. This is where the outer crust is thinnest and where scent escaping from active tunnels is easiest to detect.
Hearing plays a supporting role here too. Termite and ant colonies generate a low, continuous rustle of movement just under the surface, and an aardvark's tall, independently rotating ears can pick that up even over a light breeze. A mound that's gone quiet, meaning the colony has moved deeper or relocated entirely, tends to get passed over after this brief check.
This assessment step takes only moments, but it's the reason an aardvark can afford to be selective. Digging into a dead mound wastes energy for nothing, and an animal running a circuit of a hundred or more stops a night can't afford many wasted digs.
The Digging-In Technique
Once a mound passes inspection, the dig itself is fast and forceful. Strong, curved front claws tear open the hardened outer wall, which can be nearly as tough as concrete on older termite mounds baked by the sun for years.
The tongue does the rest. At roughly 30 centimetres long and coated in sticky saliva, it sweeps through the exposed tunnels and pulls insects out whole. An aardvark doesn't chew. Everything gets swallowed directly, and a specialised, muscular section of the stomach called the pyloric region grinds the insects down instead of teeth doing that job.
Stomach content studies from Karoo National Park have found single meals containing remains from more than one termite species, which suggests aardvarks aren't fussy about which colony they hit, only whether it's active and reachable. That flexibility matters more in areas covered in our habitat and range guide, where insect density varies a lot by soil type.
Why Some Mounds Get Skipped Entirely
Not every mound on a nightly route gets touched, even active ones. Researchers tracking foraging behaviour have suggested aardvarks avoid returning to the same mound too soon, likely because a recently raided colony needs time to rebuild before it's worth the energy of digging again.
- Mounds dug into within the past several nights, based on scent freshness
- Mounds with a weak or absent activity smell at the base
- Mounds near recent predator scent, which get avoided regardless of prey inside
This selectivity is one reason a single aardvark can visit far more mounds than it actually feeds at. It's assessing constantly, and skipping is as much a part of the routine as digging.
What Happens After the Meal
Aardvarks drink very little free-standing water, getting most of their moisture directly from the insects they eat. That's part of why they can survive in semi-arid regions where open water is scarce for much of the year, an adaptation shared with a handful of other African species built for dry conditions.
Digestion continues through the rest of the foraging circuit and well into the following day underground. Nothing about the process is rushed. A full night's intake can total more than 50,000 individual ants and termites, based on stomach content estimates from field studies, which puts real pressure on the animal to keep the circuit moving rather than linger anywhere too long.
Seasonal Shifts in Prey Availability
Termite and ant activity isn't constant across the year. During the wet season, colonies stay closer to the surface and mounds are easier to read from the outside. During drought, colonies retreat deeper, and an aardvark has to dig further and travel wider to find the same volume of food, a pattern discussed further in our piece on what an aardvark actually does every night.
According to the IUCN Red List assessment, this dependency on insect density is one of the more closely watched factors in aardvark range mapping, since food scarcity in dry years can push individuals into marginal habitat they'd otherwise avoid.
How Foraging Effort Changes Between Wet and Dry Years
Comparative studies across consecutive wet and dry seasons in the same reserve have found aardvarks visiting noticeably more mounds per night during drought years, often without a matching increase in total insects consumed. In practice, that means more energy spent searching for less return, a squeeze that shows up first in body condition scores before it shows up in visible population numbers.
Ant colonies tend to hold up slightly better than termites under dry conditions in some regions, since several common ant species nest closer to the surface even when soil moisture drops. That difference can shift the balance of an aardvark's diet somewhat during a bad year, though termites remain the larger share across most of the studied range even then.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do aardvarks eat anything besides ants and termites?
Occasionally. The aardvark cucumber, a wild melon that grows partly underground, makes up a small part of the diet in some regions and may also provide extra moisture during dry months, though ants and termites remain the overwhelming majority of what they eat.
How does an aardvark avoid termite bites and stings while feeding?
Thick, tough skin on the face and around the nostrils gives real protection against soldier termite bites, and the speed of each feeding stop, often under three minutes, limits how much exposure the aardvark takes on per mound.
Can aardvarks smell termites from underground?
Not from inside their own burrow, but once above ground and close to a mound, yes. The scent of colony activity carries through the mound's outer crust, which is how an aardvark decides whether a mound is worth digging into before it starts.
Do aardvarks damage termite mounds permanently?
Rarely. Most mounds survive a single raid and get repaired by the surviving colony over the following days or weeks, which is part of why the same mound can appear on an aardvark's route again later in the season.
The Bottom Line
Finding termite mounds in the dark comes down to smell first, hearing second, and almost no reliance on sight at all. An aardvark reads a mound from the outside in seconds, digs fast when the signs are right, and skips anything that doesn't smell active enough to be worth the energy. That system is what lets one animal cover a hundred or more mounds in a single working night.
If you're trying to spot fresh aardvark activity yourself, look for torn-open mound bases rather than the mounds themselves, since that's the clearer sign something fed there recently.