Anteater
The giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) is the largest of the anteaters, a strange looking mammal of Central and South America related to sloths and armadillos. It has a long, tube shaped snout, small eyes and ears, coarse gray brown fur with a black and white stripe across the shoulders, and a huge bushy tail it uses as a blanket when it sleeps. It has no teeth at all. Instead it tears open ant nests and termite mounds with curved front claws about 10 cm long and laps up the insects with a sticky tongue about 60 cm long that can flick in and out up to 150 times a minute, eating as many as 30,000 ants and termites a day. To protect its claws it walks on its knuckles. It lives in savannas, grasslands, wetlands and open forests from Honduras to northern Argentina, and is most often seen in the Llanos, the Cerrado and the Pantanal. Mothers carry their single baby on their back for months. Although usually calm, a cornered anteater can stand up and defend itself with its claws. The IUCN lists it as Vulnerable and decreasing because of habitat loss, fires, road deaths and hunting, and it has disappeared from much of Central America and southern South America.
What is an anteater?
Anteaters are toothless mammals from Central and South America that feed almost only on ants and termites. The animal on this page is the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), the largest and best known of them. Its scientific name means ant eater with three fingers, although it actually has five toes on each front foot, three of them with big claws. Despite the Spanish name oso hormiguero, which means ant bear, it is not related to bears. Anteaters belong to the Xenarthra, an old group of mammals that evolved in South America and also includes sloths and armadillos. Their closest living relatives are the sloths, and together they form the order Pilosa. In Brazil the giant anteater is called tamanduá bandeira, flag anteater, because of the way it carries its big tail. In Argentina and Paraguay it is also known by its Guaraní name, yurumí, and in the Llanos of Colombia and Venezuela it is often called oso palmero. It is the only living species in its genus. Its body is built around eating insects: a long snout, a sticky tongue, no teeth, powerful front legs with huge claws, and a slow metabolism that saves energy on a diet of tiny, low calorie prey.
How big is a giant anteater?
The giant anteater is about 1.8 to 2.2 meters long from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail, and the tail alone can be 65 to 90 cm. It stands about 60 cm tall at the shoulder and weighs about 25 to 45 kg, with males slightly heavier than females. The head is long and narrow, and the snout makes up much of it, ending in a small mouth opening barely wider than a pencil. The eyes and ears are small, because the anteater finds food by smell, which is about 40 times sharper than ours. The fur is coarse and stiff, gray brown, with a bold black stripe edged in white that runs from the chest over the shoulders. The front legs are pale with a black band near the feet. That pattern may help break up its outline. The front claws are its tools and weapons: the middle one can be about 10 cm long. To keep them sharp, the anteater folds them inward and walks on its knuckles, which gives it a shuffling, rolling walk. The bushy tail is covered in long hair, and at night the animal curls up under it like a blanket. Its body temperature is about 33 °C, one of the lowest of any land mammal.
How long is an anteater's tongue?
The giant anteater's tongue is about 60 cm long, longer than its head, and it is one of the most remarkable feeding tools of any mammal. It is so long that it is not anchored at the back of the mouth like ours. Instead it attaches to the breastbone, between the front legs, and when it is pulled in it lies folded inside the long snout and throat. The tongue is thin, only about 1 cm wide, and covered with tiny backward pointing spines and thick, sticky saliva from large glands in the neck. The anteater can flick it in and out of an ant nest up to 150 times a minute, catching ants, termites, eggs and larvae with each lick. Because it has no teeth, it does not chew. It crushes the insects against hard bumps on the roof of its mouth and then swallows them, along with some sand and small stones, and a muscular stomach grinds the food, a bit like a bird's gizzard. The mouth opening is tiny, so the jaws hardly move, and the anteater cannot bite. In a day it can eat as many as 30,000 ants and termites, feeding at dozens of different nests for only a minute or two at each.
Where do anteaters live?
The giant anteater lives from Central America to northern Argentina. According to the IUCN assessment published in 2025, it is still found in 14 countries: Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. It is possibly extinct in Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Uruguay, and in the southern Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo, as well as in Córdoba and Entre Ríos in Argentina. In Central America the last populations survive in the Moskitia of Honduras and in eastern Nicaragua and Panama. It is an animal of open and mixed landscapes. It does best in tropical savannas and grasslands, such as the Llanos of Colombia and Venezuela, the Cerrado of Brazil, the Rupununi of Guyana and the Beni of Bolivia, and in wetlands like the Pantanal and the Iberá Wetlands, but it also uses gallery forests, dry forests such as the Chaco, and the edges and clearings of the Amazon rainforest. It lives from sea level to about 2,000 meters. Because it needs large areas with many ant and termite nests, it disappears quickly where savannas are turned into farms and cut by roads.
What do anteaters eat?
The giant anteater eats almost only ants and termites, along with their eggs, larvae and pupae. It also takes some beetle larvae and, now and then, honey and bees, and in captivity it is fed a special mix with insects and fruit. In the wild it finds food with its nose, walking with its snout close to the ground and sniffing for nests. When it finds one, it tears a hole with its front claws, which can rip through termite mounds as hard as concrete, then pushes its snout inside and flicks its tongue in and out to collect the insects. It rarely spends more than a minute or two at a single nest. Soldier ants and termites quickly rush to defend the colony, biting and spraying chemicals, so the anteater moves on to the next nest. Because it never destroys a colony completely, the nest recovers and can be visited again weeks later, so an anteater can feed on the same colonies again and again within its home range. It prefers species without strong defenses and avoids some aggressive ants. Ants and termites give little energy, so the anteater eats tens of thousands a day and saves energy with a low body temperature and a slow pace of life. It gets much of the water it needs from its food, although it also drinks.
How do giant anteaters live?
Giant anteaters live alone, except for mothers with young and short meetings during the mating season. Each one moves over a home range that can cover from a few to more than 20 square kilometers, depending on food and habitat, and the ranges of neighbors often overlap. They are not tied to a fixed den. Each night or day they sleep in a different spot, often in tall grass, a shallow hollow or the edge of a forest, curled up with the big tail spread over the body to keep warm and hidden. They can sleep about 15 hours a day. Their activity depends on temperature and people. In cool weather and in quiet areas they are active during the day, but in hot weather or where there are farms, roads and hunting they become active mostly at night. Because their body temperature is low and their fur is thin on the belly, they use forest shade to cool down and seek sun or shelter on cold days. Anteaters walk slowly most of the time, but they can gallop for short distances when frightened, and they are good swimmers that can cross wide rivers. They communicate mainly by smell and leave scent marks, and they are mostly silent, although a young one may make sharp whistling calls when it loses its mother.
Giant anteater babies
Giant anteaters can breed at any time of the year in many areas. After a pregnancy of about 190 days, the female gives birth standing up, using her tail for support, to a single baby. The newborn weighs about 1.3 kg and already has a coat with the same stripe pattern as an adult, in miniature. Within minutes it climbs onto its mother's back and holds on to her fur. There, its black and white stripe lines up with hers, so the baby almost disappears and the pair looks like one large animal, which may help protect it from predators. The young anteater rides on its mother for about six months to a year, getting off more and more often to explore and to learn to find ants and termites, and climbing back on when it is tired or scared. It nurses for several months and begins to eat insects on its own while still being carried. Young anteaters stay with their mother until they are about one or two years old, or until she has her next baby. They become adults at about two and a half to four years. Since each female raises only one baby at a time, often with a year or more between births, giant anteater populations grow slowly and recover slowly after losses.
Are giant anteaters dangerous?
Giant anteaters are not aggressive and usually walk away from people, but they can be dangerous when cornered. An anteater cannot bite, so its only weapon is its front claws. When threatened, it rears up on its hind legs, uses its tail as a third leg for balance, and spreads its arms wide. If the attacker comes closer, it swipes with its claws or grabs and squeezes with both arms, an embrace that can cause deep wounds. With this defense, anteaters can fight off dogs and sometimes even jaguars and cougars, their main natural predators. Attacks on people are very rare and almost always happen when someone tries to catch, corner or hunt the animal. In two documented cases in Brazil, in 2010 and 2012, men were killed by giant anteaters: one was a hunter who had cornered the animal with his dogs, and the other was an elderly man. Most incidents involve hunters, farm workers or zookeepers. The best rule is simple: watch anteaters from a distance, never try to touch or chase one, and keep dogs away. In many areas the danger runs the other way, and anteaters are killed by dogs, cars and fires.
Types of anteaters and other animals called anteaters
There are four groups of true anteaters, all from the Americas. The giant anteater is the largest and lives mostly on the ground. The two tamanduas, the northern tamandua of Mexico, Central America and northwestern South America, and the southern tamandua of the rest of South America, are medium sized, about 4 to 8 kg, with a golden coat and a black vest, and they climb trees with the help of a gripping tail. The silky anteaters are tiny, golden, tree dwelling animals that weigh only a few hundred grams and are active at night. They were long treated as a single species, but in 2017 scientists split them into seven. Several other animals are also called anteaters, although they are not related. The echidna of Australia and New Guinea, an egg laying mammal covered in spines, is often called the spiny anteater. The pangolins of Africa and Asia, covered in hard scales, are sometimes called scaly anteaters. The aardvark of Africa was once called the Cape anteater, and the numbat of Australia is the banded anteater. All of them eat ants or termites and have evolved long snouts, sticky tongues and strong claws on their own, a classic example of different animals arriving at the same solution.
Is the giant anteater endangered?
The giant anteater is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, under criterion A2cd, in an assessment made on 10 May 2024 and published in 2025. The IUCN considers that the population is decreasing and that it has fallen by at least 30 percent over the past three generations, about 21 years with a generation length of 7 years. There is no reliable count of how many are left. The main threats are the conversion of savannas and forests into soy fields, cattle pastures and tree plantations, large fires, which anteaters cannot easily escape because of their slow pace and flammable fur, and road traffic. In the Pantanal, the 2020 fires burned about 30 percent of the region, and rescued orphaned anteaters were raised by conservation teams. In Brazil, roadkill is considered the biggest threat in many areas, and the Anteaters and Highways project has studied how to make roads safer. Hunting and attacks by dogs also kill many. There is good news too. In Argentina, Rewilding Argentina has released more than 100 giant anteaters in the Iberá Wetlands since 2007, bringing back a species that had disappeared there, and some have spread into southern Brazil, where an anteater was seen for the first time in more than a century.
