Do you really know < h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > anteaters? </h1>
Long nose, slow pace, like silk smooth hair. This should be the most intuitive impression of the anteaters. In fact, the anteaters have many different characteristics, let's take a look, the anteaters only feed on social insects, mainly ants and termites, which is very rare in mammals. Their adaptation to this type of food not only changes their digestive structure, but also their behavior, metabolic rate, and ability to move. Anteaters are solitary animals, living alone except for the mother, who lives with her larvae on her back.
The mother takes care of the child for up to 1 year until the baby grows to the size of an adult anteaters. Different species of anteaters do not have a large overlap in range distribution, and even at small overlaps they move at different times and strata. Large anteaters feed mainly during the day, and there are two small anteaters that are active during the day and night.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > "blind" among mammals</h1>
Anteaters are a small number of insect-catching mammals with poor vision, and the vast majority of insect-catching mammals have very good eyesight, and scientists speculate that this animal's vision is not good enough, so it relies on its sense of smell to find food. As the name suggests, their main diet is ants or other social hymenoptera insects.
Because these insects contain very few nutrients, it is difficult to feed such a large mammal, so the anteaters must eat a lot. They eat particularly quickly, digging through thick dirt with their sharp claws, spotting ants deep in the cave, and then using their tongues to roll the ants into their mouths. The entire feeding process is very frequent, so that this huge mammal can rely on insects to fill its stomach.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > unique eating "tableware"</h1>
Since you have eaten such social insects, you should ask if you are not afraid of being bitten? In fact, there is no need to worry about ants hurting the anteater, in order to be able to adapt to catching insects, the anteaters' snout is very thick, and some common ants have no way to hurt it.
In order to get enough food, anteaters often try other insects besides ants, and according to scientists' observations, they also eat the larvae of beetles and get water from food. They seem to prefer arthropods to meat, especially burrowing insects or horses. The long-term evolution makes the anteater's claws a digging tool, allowing it to quickly dig through the soil in a short period of time to find various insects below.
The two small anteaters specialize in eating small termites and ants, and, like large anteaters, avoid soldier ants. They also do not eat termite species with chemical defenses, but do eat bees and honey. A small anteater usually eats 9,000 ants a day. Two-toed anteaters eat prey, usually ants and termites that inhabit trees with an average length of 4 mm, while large anteaters eat prey of 8 mm or larger.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > how much food is on the ground</h1>
Anteaters are well-known solitary animals that live alone most of the time. When food is plentiful, the animal's range of motion is small, usually less than 1 hectare. In areas of abundant food, such as the tropical forests of Panama's Baro Clunado Island, scientists have made a series of observations of anteaters and found that they have a small range of action.
However, in some places, food is not very plentiful, such as some Central American regions, at which time the range of the anteaters is significantly increased. Many Mesoamerican anteaters can reach more than twenty square kilometers, and they do so in search of food. There may be a 30% overlap in the range of activity between male large anteaters, compared with less than 5% between female large anteaters.
In contrast to the large anteaters, each small anteater has a territory of about one square kilometer in the same well-fed habitat as Baroclonado Island. In the vast savannah, small anteaters require an activity range of about 3-4 square kilometers. The territory of male two-toed anteaters on Baro Clunado Island averages 2.8 hectares.
In contrast, a male individual needs about 11 hectares, and the range of the male individual overlaps with that of the two females, but there is no overlap with the neighboring male individual. Although the geographical distribution of the four anteaters is not the same, when they appear in the same habitat, the territory of each individual does not appear to be affected by the appearance of other individuals.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > precocious anteaters</h1>
Most anteaters mate in late summer and early autumn, so that when they give birth, it will be a warm spring and the cubs will be born in the spring. These newborns generally have more than half a year of breastfeeding, because they do not have the ability to survive independently and can only rely on the protection of their parents. However, it is worth mentioning that the larvae of anteaters are very precocious, and most medium-sized mammals develop relatively slowly, but they can develop rapidly in the first month of life.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > sleep = the most important thing</h1>
Large anteaters don't actually dig holes, they just dig a shallow, concave pit, sleep 15 hours a day, and when they rest, they cover their bodies with large fan-shaped tail wings. The two small ant-eaters generally find a tree hole to rest, and they will hide in the tree during the day and wrap their tails around the body to sleep beautifully, but they generally do not stay in one tree for more than a day, and they change trees every day. Large anteaters and two small anteaters can produce a secretion with a strong odor, which has a facial gland, but its function is unclear. Large anteaters can also distinguish their own saliva smell, but it is not clear whether they can communicate with sleeping secretions.
All anteaters have low metabolism, especially large anteaters, which are the mammals with the lowest body temperature. The body temperature of various anteaters is not very high, which means that they cannot exercise for a long time. Large anteaters and two small anteaters generally have no more than 8 hours of daily activity time, and two-toed anteaters are even shorter, only 4 hours.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > summary</h1>
With the exception of the small-scale use of small anteater skins in the local leather industry, anteaters have little commercial value and are rarely hunted by humans for food. Nevertheless, due to habitat loss and human infestation, the great anteaters have disappeared from the areas that have historically existed in Central America. In South America, they are often captured as souvenirs or by animal traders, and in some parts of Peru and Brazil, they have become extinct.
Two small anteaters often suffer bad luck when they appear in human settlements, and they are likely to be chased by hounds or crushed to death on the road. In the Venezuelan steppes, young anteaters can be domesticated and become popular pets. For anteaters and other creatures, the worst blow is the destruction of habitat and the demise of the prey on which they depend. If you want the species to continue to reproduce, you need the love and protection of human beings. The earth is not unique to humans but common to all living things.