Critically Endangered
Northern hairy-nosed wombat
Lasiorhinus krefftii
Northern hairy-nosed wombat is a mammal in the family Vombatidae (order Diprotodontia) — Lasiorhinus krefftii, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to Australia.
Appearance
Northern hairy-nosed wombats have bodies covered in soft, grey fur. The fur on their noses sets them apart from the common wombat.
Individuals can be 35 cm high, up to 1 m long and weigh up to 40 kg.
Range and habitat
At Epping Forest National Park, northern hairy-nosed wombats construct their burrows in deep, sandy soils on levée banks that were deposited by a creek that no longer flows through the area. In the park, burrows are often associated with native Lysiphyllum hookeri trees. By the 1980s the range of the northern hairy-nosed wombat had become restricted to a single site of about 300 hectares (740 acres) in the Epping National Forest in east-central Queensland, 120 kilometres (75 mi) north-west of Clermont.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The northern hairy-nosed wombat is nocturnal, living underground in networks of burrows. When rain is abundant, 50–80% of the females in the population will breed, giving birth to one offspring at a time.
Even when they do feed every day, it is only for 6 hours a day in the winter and 2 hours in the summer, significantly less than a similar-sized kangaroo, that feeds for at least 18 hours a day. Their diet consists of native grasses: black speargrass (Heteropogon contortus), bottle washer grasses (Enneapogon spp.), golden beard grass (Chrysopogon fallax), and three-awned grass (Aristida spp.), as well as various types of roots.
In crisis
In the 1930s, 30 individuals were discovered in a 3 km2 (1.2 sq mi) range within the 32 km2 (12 sq mi) Epping Forest National Park in Queensland. In 2003, the total population consisted of 113 individuals, among them only around 30 breeding females. Both species experienced a population decline between 1870 and 1920, with the main influences being culling by agriculturalists, competition for food with introduced and feral species and predation.
After having been considered extinct, a population of about 30 was discovered in the Epping Forest in the 1930s. In the last census taken in 2013, the estimated population was 196 individuals, with an additional 9 individuals at RUNR at Yarran Downs.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Northern hairy-nosed wombat is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Northern hairy-nosed wombat, Wikidata item Q1134186. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
