“If the area is suitable for them”-moist, insect-rich soil and mild winters-“they can get going.” “It doesn’t take many armadillos to start a population-just a female and her male offspring,” Taulman says. It’s still not clear whether the spread of this unusual-looking animal is part of its natural expansion, warming temperatures due to climate change, or both, he says.īut there’s no question these burrowing insect-eaters have no trouble adjusting to new habitats. (See five reasons why armadillos are awesome.) James Taulman, a retired ecologist from Park University in Missouri, first began studying armadillos’ widening range in the 1990s. “With warmer temperatures being found further north, armadillos could potentially be found in areas that were totally unexpected 20 years ago.” Armadillo superhighways “People have always made these predictions that they’re not going to move past this point, and they’ve always just kept going,” says Colleen McDonough, an ecologist and armadillo expert at Georgia’s Valdosta State University. rose by two degrees Fahrenheit between 18, and could increase by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080. Yet several studies suggest that armadillos, which prefer hot weather, could one day thrive as far north as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, aided in part by warmer winters. Officials in the neighboring states of Maryland and West Virginia haven’t reported sightings. “It’s just this wave of northward expansion.”Īs of May 2022, Moncrief has collected several additional reports of armadillos in Virginia, although she can’t say for sure how numerous or widespread the species-most closely related to sloths and anteaters-are in the state. “It was a complete surprise,” says Moncrief, who published her findings on Virginia’s first confirmed armadillo in 2021 in the journal Southeastern Naturalist. ![]() In the 1990s, they arrived in Tennessee, then North Carolina, and now Virginia. But what is certain is that the mammals, which each weigh about 12 pounds, have been moving steadily northeast over the past century, crossing the Rio Grande River in the 1850s and the Mississippi River during the Great Depression. Her exact reply to Fies: “What the are they doing in Russell County?” Moncrief, who studied at Louisiana State University, knew all about nine-banded armadillos, which are native to Central and South America, as well as parts of the U.S., including Texas. Fies’s colleagues had found evidence of an armadillo two months before, but they had been unable to trap the animal for verification. “Another Armadillo-Dead This Time,” read the subject line. That all changed in May 2019, when she received an email from Mike Fies, a wildlife biologist at the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources. And for two decades, her assumption seemed correct. ![]() Roanoke, VirginiaWhen Nancy Moncrief began her job as curator of mammalogy for the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville in 1989, she figured the number of species on her watch wouldn’t change over the course of her career.
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