Nature hasn’t (yet?) come up with a way to make animals fireproof. As a rule, the only option is to run, crawl, fly, hop, slither or burrow to safety. However, some animals can survive closer encounters with an inferno than others.
Can any animals survive wildfires?
The short-beaked echidna, a spiny, egg-laying relative of the platypus, seems to have an unusually high survival rate even if it fails to outpace the advancing flames.
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When a fire swept through echidna habitat near Perth in Western Australia in 2015, four out of five tagged individuals survived, apparently by sheltering in hollow logs. Immediately after the fire had passed, the animals entered a state of torpor, reducing their body temperature and activity levels for a few weeks – rather like hibernation - until the insects they feed on started returning to the area.
Strangely, some animals, including more than 200 species of insect, are actively attracted to fire. One of those is the black fire beetle, a type of jewel beetle widespread across Europe, Asia and North America that lays its eggs in freshly-charred wood and seeks out wildfires using specialised sense organs that are sensitive to infra-red radiation.
The species often arrives en masse while a wildfire is still burning and has been observed running over surfaces that are too hot to touch. They are also attracted by the flames and heat produced by oil refineries, smelter plants and wood burners.
Another so-called ‘pyrophile’ is a ground beetle called Sericoda obsoleta. During a wildfire in Canada, huge numbers descended from the smoke-filled sky and crawled into firefighters’ clothing.
Then there are the smoke flies. These tiny insects, just a couple of millimetres long, were thought to be vanishingly rare until they were observed swarming in a plume ofsmoke rising from a smouldering heath fire in England in the early 20th century.
Smoke fly biology remains poorly understood, but it seems that they use the plumes, where temperatures can reach 65°C, as a mating arena. Hundreds of males gather in a roughly spherical swarm that tracks the plume as it moves in the wind. Receptive females approach the swarm and pair off with one of the resident males.
There are avian pyrophiles, too. In Australia, at least three species of raptor - black kite, whistling kite and brown hawk – have come to be known as firehawks due to their habit of patrolling the edges of advancing bushfires and pouncing on small mammals and reptiles fleeing the flames.
However, firehawks apparently go further than that. Observations by firefighters and aboriginal people suggest that the birds seed new fires by picking up burning sticks in their talons or beak and transporting them to other areas. It has even been suggested that aboriginal Australians, who have long used controlled burning to encourage colonisation by favoured food species, learned these techniques by watching the firehawks.
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Main image: Getty Images