By Sophia Byl
What comes to mind when you think about fairies? The more contemporary definition involves fancy wings and a stereotypically feminine appearance, but classical folklore invites all sorts of magical creatures to be classified as fairies, provided that they are humanoid. Some fairies are benevolent, some are evil, and a couple are so strange you can’t help but be confused at their very existence. How could such a thing have made it through the gauntlet that is natural selection? Do mythical creatures even experience evolutionary pressures? (This seems like a dangerous yet intriguing rabbit hole. If your interest has been piqued, research at your own risk.)
An armadillo, on the other hand, shares a rather limited pool of qualities with these creatures of folklore. It doesn’t have wings, and it certainly doesn’t hop around casting spells and tricks on unsuspecting humans. It mainly just digs and eats bugs and minds its own business. Of course, one species of armadillo had to go and be different, and that would be the smallest and furriest species of them all, much more comparable to a fairy than its blandly-colored, hard-shelled friends. Brought to you by the arid deserts of Argentina and looking like it was sponsored by Cartoon Network–the pink fairy armadillo.
At first glance, the pink fairy armadillo looks fairly odd. Armadillos aren’t supposed to have copious amounts of fur, let alone fur the color of strawberry yogurt. The absurdly large claws make a bit more sense, since armadillos are well known for their digging abilities, but they don’t change the fact that the pink fairy armadillo is one uniquely strange creature. And it’s a very elusive animal as well: scientists don’t even have enough data on population numbers to know whether or not the species is endangered. Mariella Superina, a conservation biologist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina who studies the pink fairy armadillo, has never even seen a living specimen in the wild for the 13 years she has been researching the animal.
So how do we even know anything about this armadillo, if it keeps evading researchers? There are some factors that would cause a pink fairy armadillo to come out of its burrow, such as flooding or the presence of an obstacle that would require the armadillo to go above ground to clear. Scientists are able to draw conclusions from the few armadillos that survive in captivity, although they don’t typically last too long given that they are so specialized for underground life.
The first order of business is to address that wildly colored shell, and the reason for its rosy hue is both very cool and very gross. The pink color comes from large amounts of blood vessels that are very close to the armadillo’s skin. This allows the little animal to regulate its body temperature very efficiently; it can dump heat by increasing blood flow to those vessels, or conserve it by reconducting the blood to vessels further from the surface.
The other curious thing about the pink fairy’s shell is that it isn’t meant for protection, like how it functions for other species of armadillo. Spending nearly its entire life underground means that the little armadillo won’t often run into predators, and even if it does, its massive claws make it easy to quickly dig an escape route. It makes sense, then, that its shell is soft and flexible to make traversing the underground networks of Argentina as easy and comfortable as possible.
These facts, though fascinating, are about the extent of what most scientists know about the pink fairy armadillo. Mariella Superina describes the privilege of seeing one as a “magical experience”, but the finicky nature of the armadillos and tendency to get quite anxious makes them difficult to care for. This is why it’s imperative that researchers like Superina find ways to observe the pink fairies in their natural habitats.
A promising solution looks like trained dogs: an organization in Africa has already successfully gotten dogs to track pangolins, a scaled animal similar to the armadillo. If a solid tracking method is uncovered, the pink fairy armadillo will help us learn more about the habits of subterranean mammals, and how to conserve them. It might even lead to the saving of a species that might have otherwise gone extinct–and surely no one wants these bizarre little fairies gone.
