I used to think anteaters were just weird-looking mammals with bad posture, but then I watched one feeding and realized their tongue is doing something genuinely bizarre.
The giant anteater’s tongue can extend up to two feet—roughly 60 centimeters, give or take—and it flicks in and out of termite mounds at a rate of about 150 times per minute. That’s faster than most hummingbird wingbeats, which seems excessive until you consider what they’re actually hunting. Ants and termites don’t just sit around waiting to be eaten; they bite, they spray formic acid, they swarm. So the anteater’s strategy is basically: get in, grab as many as possible, get out before the colony mounts a proper defense. It’s a smash-and-grab operation, except the smashing is done by claws and the grabbing is done by a sticky, worm-like appendage that has no business being that long. The tongue itself is attached not to the mouth, really, but to the sternum—the breastbone—which is why it can extend so far. I guess it makes sense when you think about the engineering, but it still looks wrong.
Here’s the thing: the tongue isn’t just long, it’s covered in tiny backward-facing spines called papillae, and it’s coated in saliva produced by massive salivary glands. Those glands, by the way, are absurdly large—some estimates put them at roughly 15 inches long in giant anteaters, which is longer than most people’s forearms. The saliva is thick and sticky, almost like flypaper, and it doesn’t just trap insects; it immobilizes them so they can’t bite or spray during the swallowing process.
The Evolutionary Trade-Off That Makes Anteaters Defenseless Against Most Threats But Perfect for One Thing
Anyway, here’s where it gets messy: anteaters don’t have teeth. At all. They gave up chewing entirely in favor of this tongue-based feeding system, which means they can’t process anything that isn’t soft-bodied and small. They’re locked into this diet—no berries, no roots, no scavenging. Just insects. Turns out this specialization happened sometime in the Paleogene period, maybe 50 million years ago, when South America was an island continent and anteaters’ ancestors were evolving in isolation. They probably faced less competition for insect prey back then, so going all-in on this weird feeding method made sense. But now? They’re stuck with it, and if insect populations collapse, they’re in trouble.
Wait—maybe I’m being too dramatic.
The tongue muscles themselves are fascinating in a kind of exhausting way. There are no bones in the tongue, just muscle and connective tissue, and the whole thing is controlled by a hyoid apparatus that’s been heavily modified. Most mammals use the hyoid to support the tongue for chewing and swallowing, but anteaters use it to shoot the tongue forward like a projectile. The muscles contract in waves, which is why the tongue moves so fast—it’s not just extending, it’s being actively thrust outward and then retracted in a continuous loop. I’ve seen slow-motion footage of this, and it’s honestly unsettling. The tongue doesn’t move smoothly; it jerks and pulses, and you can see the insects getting stuck to it in clumps. It’s efficient, sure, but it’s also kind of grotesque, and I can’t help but wonder if the anteater finds it exhausting to eat this way or if it’s just autopilot at this point.
Why Sticky Saliva Alone Would Fail Without the Structural Adaptations We Almost Never Discuss
The salivary chemistry is worth mentioning too, even though it’s the kind of detail that makes your eyes glaze over. The mucus contains glycoproteins that create this viscous, adhesive texture—basically biological superglue. But it has to be the right consistency: too thick and the tongue can’t move fast enough, too thin and the insects slip off. So anteaters produce saliva that’s calibrated to the exact viscosity needed for high-speed insect capture, which is a level of evolutionary fine-tuning that seems almost absurd when you think about it. And they produce a lot of it—some estimates suggest they secrete more than a liter of saliva per day, which is wild for an animal that weighs maybe 40 kilograms.
The Biomechanical Problem of Eating 30,000 Insects Daily Without Ever Biting Down
Giant anteaters can consume upwards of 30,000 insects in a single day, which sounds impressive until you realize they have to visit dozens of different colonies to do it. They can’t just camp out at one termite mound because the insects will eventually overwhelm them with defensive chemicals. So they move constantly, spending maybe a minute or two at each site, which means their entire day is just… walking and licking. No downtime, no variety, just an endless cycle of sniffing out colonies, ripping them open with those massive claws, and then slurping up whatever they can before retreating. It’s a grind, honestly, and it makes you wonder if anteaters ever get bored or if their brains are just wired to find this endlessly satisfying.
How a Tongue Anchored to the Chest Solves a Problem Most Mammals Never Had
The anchoring system is probabyl the weirdest part. Most mammal tongues are rooted in the mouth and throat, but the anteater’s tongue attaches way down at the sternum, which gives it the leverage to extend so far forward. There’s this whole muscular sling that runs from the chest up through the throat and into the skull, and when it contracts, it pulls the tongue back like a rubber band snapping into place. The mechanics are actually similar to a chameleon’s tongue, which is bizarre because chameleons and anteaters aren’t closely related at all—it’s a case of convergent evolution, where two totally different lineages stumbled onto the same solution for catching small, fast-moving prey. I guess if you’re going to specialize in eating things that don’t want to be eaten, you end up with similar tools regardless of whether you’re a reptile or a mammal. Anyway, the whole system is so specialized that baby anteaters are born with tongues that are already disproportionately long, which must make nursing weird, but I’ve never seen research on that and honestly I’m not sure I want to.
