Numbats have around fifty teeth, more than most land mammals, but the teeth are small, blunt and largely non-functional. Feeding is done by the tongue, which can extend roughly half the animal's head-and-body length and is coated in sticky saliva. The numbat rips open shallow subterranean galleries and rotting logs with its forepaws and licks up the occupants.
Termites move through their surface galleries on a daily temperature cycle, which is why the numbat forages by day when nearly every other small marsupial is asleep. That schedule leaves it exposed to hawks and, since European settlement, to foxes and cats. It shelters overnight in hollow logs and burrows, sealing itself in with a thickened rump.
The animal is often described as an anteater, and does resemble one in shape, but it is not related to true anteaters and it does not eat ants except incidentally, when they are swallowed alongside the termites it is targeting.