40 Fun Facts About Anteaters

Which Surrealist painter walked a giant anteater on a leash out of a Paris Metro station in 1969?

Salvador Dalí held the leash in what was a staged photo stunt, and the animal was most likely borrowed from a zoo, not kept as a pet.

Which feature of nearly every other mammal's mouth is completely missing in all anteaters, large and small?

Teeth are absent in every anteater, so insects are crushed against the roof of the mouth and then pulverised by a very muscular stomach.

Which part of its front feet does a giant anteater walk on, keeping its long claws tucked away?

Knuckles take the weight, as they do for gorillas and chimpanzees, so the claws stay curled up and sharp for ripping into nests.

Feeding for only about a minute at each nest, a giant anteater can still eat roughly how many insects a day?

30,000 or so ants and termites vanish in a day, yet each nest loses only a small share before the raider moves on to the next one.

Where does a baby giant anteater spend much of its first year, its stripe lined up with its mother's?

Riding on her back, the youngster blends its black-and-white stripe into hers, so the pair look like one larger animal to a predator.

Which sense, said to be 40 times keener than a human's, guides a giant anteater to hidden insect nests?

Smell does nearly all the work, because the eyesight is poor; a giant anteater can even tell which species of ant is inside before it starts digging.

Which mammals share the order Pilosa with anteaters and are their closest living relatives?

Sloths and anteaters parted ways around 58 million years ago, and armadillos are the next nearest cousins of both.

Which African burrowing mammal is often called an antbear, though it is no relation of the true anteaters?

Aardvark is Afrikaans for earth pig, and the animal's long snout and taste for termites arose quite separately from any anteater's.

Giant anteaters are built for ripping open insect nests, yet zoos call them surprisingly good at what?

Swimming comes easily to a giant anteater, which paddles with a freestyle stroke and holds its long snout above the water like a snorkel.

Which University of California campus has called its sports teams the Anteaters since a 1965 student vote?

UC Irvine students picked the anteater in a campus election, passing over a roadrunner, a unicorn, a seahawk and a golden bison.

About how long is the sticky, worm-like tongue that a giant anteater flicks into ant and termite nests?

60 cm (2 ft) of tongue helps explain the scientific name for the anteaters, Vermilingua, which literally means worm tongue.

Which powerful predator is one of only two animals known to hunt fully grown giant anteaters?

Jaguar and puma are the only hunters of adults, and it is risky work, because a cornered giant anteater's front claws can potentially kill the cat.

What does a cornered giant anteater do when a predator closes in?

It stands on its hind legs, steadied by its big tail like a tripod, which leaves both clawed arms free to slash.

What is a baby giant anteater called, born singly after a pregnancy of about six months?

Pup is the word, and a newborn arrives with a full coat of hair, looking almost identical to a tiny adult.

Where does the giant anteater, by far the largest member of its family, spend nearly all of its time?

On the ground is where it forages and sleeps, while its smaller relatives spend much of their lives up in the trees.

A giant anteater's tongue can dart in and out of a nest up to about how many times a minute?

150 flicks a minute, more than two every second, lets the animal grab a meal before the nest's soldiers can drive it off.

Which scale-covered mammal of Africa and Asia is widely known as the scaly anteater?

Pangolin scales are made of keratin, the same material as human fingernails, and the animal curls into an armoured ball when threatened.

Which egg-laying mammal of Australia and New Guinea is sometimes called the spiny anteater?

Echidna and platypus are the only living mammals that lay eggs, and the echidna's quills and ant-catching tongue explain the nickname.

The underside of a tamandua's tail is bare of fur, which helps this tree-climbing anteater do what?

Grip branches is the answer: bare skin gives a firmer hold, so the tail works like a fifth limb while the animal feeds high up.

Giant anteaters make no stomach acid of their own, so which acid from their prey helps digest each meal?

Formic acid, the stinging chemical that many ants carry, does the job once thousands of the insects reach the stomach.

The giant anteater's stomach crushes insects with hardened folds and sand, much like which bird organ?

Gizzard-style crushing makes up for a mouth that cannot chew, with the sand and soil swallowed at each meal doing the work of millstones.

A giant anteater's tongue is so long that its muscles are anchored far behind the mouth, on which bone?

Breastbone, or sternum, is the anchor point, and the tongue retreats into the throat between licks without blocking the animal's breathing.

What do biologists call the process that gave anteaters and unrelated ant-eating mammals such similar snouts?

Convergent evolution produced digging forearms, long tongues and tube-like snouts separately in several mammal groups that raid termite mounds.

Which land bridge, formed about three million years ago, let anteaters spread north?

Isthmus of Panama joined two long-separated continents, and anteaters walked north in the wildlife swap known as the Great American Interchange.

Which IUCN Red List category covers the giant anteater, already wiped out in Uruguay and parts of Paraguay?

Vulnerable is the listing, earned by a population that fell by more than 30 percent in three generations as its habitat was lost.

Which hazard struck Brazil's Emas National Park in 1994, killing many of its giant anteaters?

Wildfires are a special danger because a giant anteater's long coat catches light easily and the animal is too slow to outrun the flames.

A southern tamandua's long tongue slides out of a mouth opening about as wide as which everyday object?

A pencil eraser, about 6 millimetres across, is all the gap this anteater needs, since only its slender tongue and the insects stuck to it pass through.

Which naturalist gave the giant anteater its scientific name, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, in the year 1758?

Carl Linnaeus built the name from Greek words meaning anteater and three fingers, even though each foot actually carries five toes.

Europeans once believed that all giant anteaters were female and mated using which part of the body?

Nose-to-nose mating was the popular belief after the animals were first shipped across the Atlantic for display, until naturalist Félix de Azara corrected it.

Why was a 2017 Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner, showing an anteater at a termite mound, disqualified?

The animal was stuffed, judges at London's Natural History Museum concluded, matching it to a taxidermy mount displayed at the park's entrance; the photographer denied it.

In Amazonian indigenous stories, the anteater is a comical figure and which stock character?

Trickster tales include one in which an anteater challenges a rival to a diving contest, then makes off with its coat and leaves its own pelt behind.

Which word, describing its fine fur, names the smallest anteater, a tree-dweller weighing no more than 400 grams?

Silky anteaters measure only about 40 cm from snout to tail tip, sleep curled in a ball by day and hunt ants along vines after dark.

From which indigenous language did Portuguese borrow the word tamandua, said to mean ant hunter?

Tupi gave Portuguese the word tamanduá, first written down in a letter of 1560, and Portuguese speakers now use it for every kind of anteater.

Which Central American country marks the northern limit of the giant anteater's surviving range?

Honduras is as far north as the species still lives, although fossils show that it once ranged all the way to Sonora in Mexico.

Which people of the Brazilian Amazon wear anteater masks during naming and initiation ceremonies?

Kayapo tradition treats the masks with great care: a man who falls while wearing one is said to risk death or disability.

Which founder of Surrealism was nicknamed Le Tamanoir, French for the anteater, by his fellow artists?

André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and the nickname stuck so well that a bookplate drawn for him in about 1931 carries it.

Xenarthra, the group uniting anteaters and armadillos, is named for strange extra joints in which body part?

The backbone carries the extra joints, which stiffen the lower spine and help brace a digging animal as it tears into a nest.

Southern tamanduas on which Caribbean island are almost always a plain, solid blonde colour?

Trinidad tamanduas almost never show dark markings, while animals from the south-east of the species' range are boldly marked in black.

The black markings on a northern tamandua's pale fur are usually likened to which piece of clothing?

A vest is the usual comparison, and the northern species always wears one, while its southern cousin can be marked, part-marked or plain.

In which Johnny Hart comic strip does an anteater snap up ants with a sticky tongue and a loud ZOT?

Cavemen fill the cast of B.C., whose artist drew the ant-catcher as a hybrid with extra-long ears and a giant anteater's bushy tail.