“A giant anteater's tongue can be almost two feet long and flick in and out about 150 times every minute.”
Giant anteaters cross South American grasslands and open forests in search of ant and termite colonies. Powerful foreclaws break into nests, while a long, sticky tongue gathers thousands of insects without the animal needing teeth.
By An Nguyen · Published · Updated
Myrmecophaga tridactylaPilosaMyrmecophagidae
Browse photographs of giant anteater across habitat, behavior, anatomy, and life stages.
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Core article
A closer look at habitat, diet, behavior, reproduction, and conservation.
The giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) is a toothless, insect-eating mammal of Central and South America built almost entirely around one job: opening ant and termite nests and hoovering up the occupants. It rips into a nest with powerful foreclaws, then works a sticky tongue that reaches about two feet in and out of the breach many times a second. It lives across grassland, savanna, wetland, and forest, and is listed as Vulnerable.
The giant anteater is a study in specialisation for eating ants (myrmecophagy). It has no teeth at all; its skull is drawn out into a narrow, down-curved tube, and its tongue — up to two feet long, longer than the skull itself — is anchored not in the throat but back at the breastbone, and coated in sticky saliva from enlarged glands. Its forelimbs carry three large, curved claws so important that the animal walks on its knuckles to keep them from blunting against the ground. It also runs one of the lowest body temperatures of any land mammal, about 91°F, a way to save energy on a low-calorie insect diet. The largest of the anteaters, it measures 6 to 7 feet from snout to tail and weighs 60 to 100 pounds, with a coarse coat marked by a diagonal black-and-white stripe.
The giant anteater's stronghold is South America — Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru — after being lost from much of Central America. It is flexible about biome, living in humid rainforest and in open country like the Pantanal wetlands and the Brazilian Cerrado (savanna), but does best in a mosaic: open grassland to forage in, with forest patches for resting and shade in the heat of the day.
The giant anteater feeds mainly on ants, termites, and their larvae, including abundant species such as leafcutter ants. Its strategy is a quick raid rather than a siege: it smells out an active mound, tears a hole with a few strokes of its claws, and inserts its snout. Because soldier insects respond at once with bites and chemical sprays, it cannot linger — the tongue flicks in and out up to about 150 times a minute, insects stick to the saliva, and they are crushed against a hard palate and passed to a muscular, gizzard-like stomach that grinds them with swallowed grit. A feeding bout rarely lasts a minute before the anteater moves on, which leaves the colony intact as a future food source.
Giant anteaters are solitary, meeting only to mate or while a mother raises a pup. They build no dens; instead an anteater curls into a shallow depression and drapes its huge bushy tail over itself as a blanket and as camouflage. Activity is flexible — diurnal where undisturbed, shifting to night where there is heat or human pressure. Threatened, a giant anteater rears up on its hind legs, balancing on its tail, and slashes with its foreclaws, a defence that can seriously injure a puma or jaguar.
Reproduction is slow. After a gestation of about six months the female bears a single, well-developed pup, which immediately climbs onto her back. The pup's coat is a miniature of the adult's, and its stripe lines up with the mother's so precisely that the youngster blurs into her outline, hiding it from predators. It nurses for months and keeps riding until it is about half her size, close to a year old — a long investment that keeps reproductive rates low. Wild giant anteaters generally live 14 to 16 years.
The giant anteater is Vulnerable and steadily declining, already gone from most of Central America. Habitat destruction for soy and cattle fragments its range, and its poor eyesight and long-distance wandering make it very prone to being hit on expanding roads. A growing modern threat is intense, human-lit grassland fire: slow-moving and covered in a shaggy, flammable coat, the anteater often cannot escape a fast-moving blaze.
Kingdom
Animalia
Phylum
Chordata
Class
Mammalia
Order
Pilosa
Family
Myrmecophagidae
Genus
Myrmecophaga
Species
M. tridactyla
A giant anteater's tongue can be almost two feet long and flick in and out about 150 times every minute.
Anteaters have no teeth at all, so they swallow ants and termites whole.
One giant anteater can eat tens of thousands of ants and termites in a single day.
A baby anteater rides on its mother's back, and its stripe lines up with hers like a clever disguise.
Anteaters walk on their knuckles to keep their long, sharp claws from getting dull.
Giant anteaters have one of the lowest body temperatures of any mammal to help save energy.
Select a question to reveal the answer.
A giant anteater is a large mammal from Central and South America with a long snout, a bushy tail, and no teeth. It belongs to the same group as sloths and uses a long, sticky tongue to eat ants and termites.
Giant anteaters live in the grasslands, savannas, wetlands, and tropical forests of Central and South America, from Honduras all the way south to northern Argentina.
Giant anteaters eat ants and termites. They tear open a nest with their strong claws and quickly lap up the insects with a long, sticky tongue before the soldiers can bite back.
A giant anteater's tongue can stretch almost two feet long, longer than its own head. It is coated in sticky spit and can flick in and out about 150 times a minute.
A giant anteater can measure about six to seven feet from the tip of its snout to the end of its tail and weigh between 60 and 100 pounds. That makes it the biggest of all the anteaters.
Giant anteaters are listed as Vulnerable. They are threatened by habitat loss, grassland fires, and being hit by cars, and their numbers are slowly going down.
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