If you don’t live in Australia, you may never have seen a numbat — even if you do, you may still have never seen one. The numbat is small, well-camouflaged, and … there aren’t many to see. That’s because they’re endangered.
Though its territory once covered most of the bottom half of Australia, from the west of New South Wales to Western Australia, the numbat is now limited to two indigenous populations in southwest Western Australia (Dryandra National Park and the Upper Warren region) and several reintroduced populations in predator-proof enclosures and predator-controlled areas, explains Sian Thorn.
Thorn is a biologist and researcher who studies numbats at the University of Western Australia in Perth. In 2022, Thorn and colleagues published a study showing that remote-sensor camera traps effectively got accurate counts of numbats in the wild. Their research provided a happy bonus: They found more numbats than expected. Sadly, however, the total population is still only around 2,500 individuals.
“Numbats are very hard to spot in the wild, so they’re a bit of a treasure species to actually see,” says Thorn. “Even within the context of Australian wildlife, numbats are very unique.”
Thorn and her colleagues are working to save this unique marsupial. Meanwhile, we can enjoy some cool facts about numbats:
