One might think that anteaters, such as the giant African
Pangolin, have an easy life. They eat ants and the plains are full of anthills
just waiting to be raided for their contents. However, ants have their own ways
of making things uncomfortable for anteaters.
When a mound has been slashed open the ants will swarm out
in their thousands to mount a stern defence. Many will perish in the attempt, being
caught on the anteater’s long sticky tongue and swallowed whole, but others
will try to penetrate the monster’s eyes and nostrils. The anteater will get
round this by shutting its eyes with its particularly thick eyelids and using
special muscles that close its nostrils.
Even so, the anteater will soon find the experience not to be
one worth prolonging and may be forced to give up after having consumed only
about a hundred ants. A pangolin can eat up to 200,000 ants in a night, which
means that it has to be extremely busy finding ant colonies and grabbing what
it can at every opportunity.
There are also ant species that have defences that will
dissuade anteaters from even trying their luck with them. These include
leaf-cutter ants and army ants, both of which have strong jaws that can give an
anteater’s snout a very sharp nip.
The fact that various species of anteater and ant have
evolved feeding and defence strategies that put them in balance means that all
their species have survived down to the present day. In other words, there are
still enough ants to feed the anteaters, but not so many anteaters that all ant
colonies are destroyed.
© John Welford
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