What has a 24-inch tongue, no teeth, and eats 30,000 of his favorite treats each day? And who is clever enough not to be stung while nabbing those tasty treats? And who isn’t able to stay warm very well, (because the favorite treats don’t have too much nutritional value) but has a nifty and distinctive tail that works as both camouflage and a handy blanket?
It’s the Giant Anteater, a seemingly congenial slowpoke who lives in Central and South America, and those preferred treats are – you guessed it - ants, the kind with a nasty bite. The Giant Anteater may look like some strange creature imagined by Dr. Seuss, but don’t be fooled. These huge animals can grow up to 8 feet (including tails) and weigh up to 140 pounds – and though they may seem slow and low energy, they are perfectly adapted to their environment. And that 2-foot tongue is anything but slow! It can flick up to 150 times per minute, and is equipped with special sticky saliva as well has interesting little spines which point backwards. In other words, Giant Anteaters are models of efficiency when it comes to eating ants, and termites too.
And though 30,000 of anything might sound a little gluttonous, Giant Anteaters are very clever and discriminating hunters. Though they have limited eyesight, they more than compensate for this with a sense of smell 40 times more acute than our own. This means that they can identify a particular species of ant or termite before they go to the trouble of tearing open a mound. And once they access their tiny, frantic prey, they do not gorge, because doing so could destroy the particular mound for future feeding. Besides, if they linger, they could get bitten. They quickly snatch up the ants or termites, then squish them on the roof of their mouths, and then dispatch them to their unusually muscular stomachs for further pulverizing. Research indicates that a given Giant Anteater will only extract about 140 ants from a given mound per day, so you can imagine how many stops he or she must make to ingest tens of thousands of them.
They are mostly solitary, and mostly slow and peaceable. However, when the situation calls for it, Giant Anteaters can rear up on their back legs to threaten or defend against predators, like pumas and jaguars. They do have some pretty impressive 4-inch claws. If necessary, they can also “gallop” at about 30 miles per hour. They can climb and swim as well, using that amazing snout as a snorkel! But these creatures far prefer to eat and sleep, curled up securely under their bushy tails. Evidence suggests they are mostly active during the day, but they are still adapting, even though they’ve been on earth for about 25 million years. In response to weather conditions, or in areas where humans live nearby, they simply become nocturnal.
Unfortunately, proximity to humans is becoming a greater problem for them. As human populations and their agriculture expand, the Giant Anteaters’ habitat is shrinking, and of course at the same time their interactions with humans are increasing. The Anteaters and Highways Project in the Cerrado region of Brazil is researching the Anteaters’ travels in order to determine why so many of them are killed in highway accidents. Sugar cane farming is also having a huge impact on the Giant Anteater; growers set fire to their fields in order to make the sugar cane easier to cut; Anteaters sometimes suffer significant burns through this process, but their habitats and insect diets are also affected.
Because the Giant Anteater breeds only once a year and has only one offspring per successful breeding, their populations can’t weather much reduction from human sources like cane fields or autos. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists the Giant Anteater as vulnerable, which estimates that the current population, about 5000 in the wild, will be reduced by approximately 20% in the next decade. In other words, they’re just about to be considered endangered. But there’s good news, right here in Tucson. The Reid Park Zoo has a breeding pair of these unique creatures, and this summer they are being reintroduced. In other words, we may soon be looking forward to an anteater pup! It wouldn’t be the first time this pair, in the safe environment of the Reid Park Zoo, has helped to save their species; like so many of the animals already in the Zoo, as well as those planned to live in the Reid Park Zoo expansion, their lives and their care are an important part of the quest to protect biodiversity on this beautiful planet.
Thank you for reading! For more content like this please visit reidparkzooexpansion.org.
