{"id":18700,"date":"2023-12-28T05:21:30","date_gmt":"2023-12-27T23:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=18700"},"modified":"2025-04-05T12:32:53","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T07:02:53","slug":"aardvarks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/aardvarks\/","title":{"rendered":"Aardvarks"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>About Aardvarks<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>It gets its name from a South African word\u00a0meaning \u201cearth pig.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Appearance: They look\u00a0like a pig, especially with its body and snout.<\/li>\n<li>They actually share common ancestors with elephants and golden moles.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>They are\u00a0nocturnal mammals, most active at night and tend to live alone. During the day, they sleep curled up in a ball in their burrows.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>This species has been assessed as having the\u00a0highest score for evolutionary distinctiveness,<\/li>\n<li>This is because it does not have many close relatives and has been\u00a0evolving independently for millions of years.<\/li>\n<li>The Aardvark is the sole surviving species of its\u00a0order, Tubulidentata, and its closest relatives have been extinct since the Pleistocene era (2 million years ago).<\/li>\n<li>Diet: The aardvark\u2019s diet consists almost entirely of ants and termites.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Habitat:\u00a0Aardvarks are found over much of the\u00a0southern two-thirds of Africa and their habitat is\u00a0savannah and semiarid areas.<\/li>\n<li>Ecosystem Roles: Aardvarks are important in their ecosystem because the holes they dig are used by a variety of other animals for shelter.<\/li>\n<li>Conservation Status\n<ul>\n<li>IUCN :Least Concern<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The recent study concluded that the\u00a0genetic structure of aardvarks is strongly shaped by climate, with arid areas limiting gene flow and reflected apparent isolation by adaptation associated with temperature.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1) What is Savanna vegetation?<\/h3>\n<p>It is a vegetation type that grows under hot, seasonally dry climatic conditions and is characterized by an open tree canopy (i.e., scattered trees) above a continuous tall grass understory (the vegetation layer between the forest canopy and the ground). The largest areas of savanna are found in Africa, South America, Australia and India etc.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.downtoearth.org.in\/news\/africa\/aardvarks-are-crucial-for-sub-saharan-africa-s-ecosystem-but-climate-change-is-impacting-their-chances-of-survival-93584\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>Aardvarks are crucial for sub-Saharan Africa\u2019s ecosystem \u2014 but climate change is impacting their chances of survival<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aardvarks are nocturnal mammals, most active at night and tend to live alone. During the day, they sleep curled up in a ball in their burrows. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":18701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18700","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}