They reach 2.5 feet long. Weight 50 to 60 pounds. Members of the hyena family, aardwolves are more closely related to civets, mongooses and meerkats than dogs or wolves. Aardwolves occupy the southern border of Egypt to central Tanzania, and range from Angola and Zambia to the Cape of good Hope. They are commonly found in open sandy plains or brush country.
Aardwolves are insectivores with highly specialized diets of harvester termites.
These termites are unable to tolerate light, and come out in late afternoon to evening in dense columns which aardwolves lap up with their long sticky tongues. During lean seasons, aardwolves feed on other insects and larvae dug out of the ground. An aardwolf may consume 200,000 termites in a single night, so are important in controlling these insects. With their large ears and acute hearing, aardwolves locate prey mainly by sound. Unlike the larger hyena which have only four toes on their forefeet, aardwolves have five toes, and for this reason, are sometimes placed in a separate family, Protelidae .