Wombats Did Not Save Other Animals During Recent Wildfires
The Claim
Australian Wombats “Shepherded” animals into their burrows to help them escape the country’s rampant wildfires.
News posted on
Emerging story
On January 9th 2019, the Instagram account of Greenpeace, an environmental activist organization, posted that “reports from Australia [have shown] that countless small animals have escaped death because wombats, unusually, opted to share their massive, complex burrows. [There have] Even [been] reports that they have been observed exhibiting ‘shepherding behavior.’”
Misbar’s Analysis
Greenpeace claims to have shared this info from another social media post in Australia, but provides no link to it or evidence otherwise. Misbar has not been able to find a social media post earlier than theirs.
By January 13th the story had gone viral (with one retweet receiving 72,000 retweets and 277,000 likes) and scientists began to weigh in on the matter, especially considering Australian wildfires have been in the headlines and have taken the lives of about a billion animals. Jackie French, author and director of The Wombat Foundation, told IFLScience, an online science publication and media company, that she was “skeptical” of claims of shepherding. She told IFL, “wombats are extremely short-sighted. They focus mostly on food and dirt. It would be hard for them to see well enough to shepherd, nor have I seen one do so.”
Scott Carver, senior lecturer in wildlife ecology at the University of Tasmania, furthermore told The Associated Press that rather than "herd" anything, wombats are much more likely to simply “tolerate” other species taking shelter in their massive burrows. After all, wombats are the largest burrowing animals with some of their burrows stretching up to 650 feet and therefore make great shelters from wildfires.
Associate Professor Steve Johnston from the University of Queensland completes our picture in his interview with the Brisbane Times, saying “a lot of those [massive] burrows could be empty, so animals could easily make their way into those burrows to escape the fire.”
In conclusion, Wombats don’t have the capacity to ‘shepherd’ anything, or ‘invite’ anything into their burrows, as far as our current scientific knowledge is able to tell us. However, they do build very large burrows that would make the perfect shelter from wildfires and animals probably do make use of them during wildfires such as the ones currently impacting Australian wildlife.
