Australia’s iconic marsupial has been viewed as a food source, pest, mascot and, now, a conservation concern. Scientists are breaking down myths—using genetics, robots and citizen science—and finding new ways to protect the animals.
This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
When Sydney hosted the 2000 Summer Olympics, an unlikely hero emerged: an unofficial mascot known as Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. Introduced by comedians, it helped to kick off a wave of love for a critter not always adored by human Australians. Over the centuries, the native marsupial has been eaten in stew and maligned as a pest. Now, it’s a focus of conservation and animal welfare efforts.
Wombats are closely related to koalas and nurture their young in pouches like other marsupials. Of the three species, one is threatened and another endangered, but the bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus), found in Southeast Australia and Tasmania and thought to number more than a million, is neither. So it’s been studied less than its hairy-nosed cousins.
“This is a species that everyone loves, but just doesn’t know too much about,” says Georgia Stannard, an archaeologist at La Trobe University in Bundoora/Melbourne.
Stannard is one of a handful of scientists working to change that, and the efforts are bearing fruit. Over the past decade, research on bare-nosed wombats has revealed characteristics of its subterranean habitat (as explored by robot), the meat cuts most favored by Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples thousands of years ago (head, chest and forelimbs were brought home to the cave), and the intestinal methods responsible for its startling, cube-shaped droppings (which earned a tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel Prize in 2019). Recent work has also illuminated the worrisome effects of a parasitic disease that first came to the continent with European colonists.
Stannard, along with Scott Carver of the University of Georgia in Athens and Alynn Martin of Texas A&M University-Kingsville, summarized the state of knowledge on the bare-nosed wombat in the 2024 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences. In addition to noting its prodigious digging prowess and busting wombat myths (it does not have a square-shaped anus and is unlikely to attain speeds of 25 miles per hour), the authors write that bare-nosed wombats could be in trouble due to dangers from roads and conflicts with people. Climate change and the spread of mange also pose hazards to the remaining populations.
“It’s not a big stretch of the imagination to say within, potentially, I guess 50 to 100 years, that wombats could decline to a point that they would be considered endangered,” Stannard says.
