Their long nails allow them to dig for their preferred diet of roots and tubers. They feed on grasses such as Blady Grass and various species of native herbs,tubers, roots, fungi and some insects.

An important part of their diet are native truffles, which are the spore-bearing bodies of underground fungi.

Those fungi associate with the rootlets of trees such as eucalypts, helping the tree to take up minerals from the soil. By digging up and eating the truffles, bettongs disperse those spores in their dung, helping the fungi to spread to new hosts. In that way bettongs play an important role in ecosystems.

Apart from mothers with young, they nest solitary in the wild. They have a prehensile tail which they use to carry grasses gathered for their multiple nest sites built by individual animals enabling them to flee to a new site should a predator approach.

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