According to the IUCN Red List, the giant anteater is the most endangered mammal in Central America. Listed as an endangered species, it is considered extinct in Guatemala, El Salvador and Uruguay. One of the biggest threats giant anteaters face is the loss of their grassland habitats due to fires caused by sugar cane farmers, who traditionally burn their fields before harvest to remove the outer leaves of the sugar cane plant, making it easier to cut cane stalks. These fires not only affect the habitat,
but also the animals: giant anteaters can suffer severe burns.
Other threats include hunting—both for food and because some people consider giant anteaters a pest—and their low reproductive rates.Giant anteaters are also frequently killed by road traffic in Brazil's Cerrado biome, where a vast road network has destroyed their habitat.
Conservation
In Argentina, the Iberá Project has rescued and reintroduced over a hundred orphaned anteaters into the wild. In Brazil, sugar cane burning is being phased out in some parts of the country while conservationists, including National Geographic Photo Ark EDGE Fellow Vinicius Alberici, are working in the Cerrado biome to collect data on how roads affect the giant anteaters in hopes of finding new ones create protection.
Eating Ants
The giant anteater uses its sharp claws to open an opening in an anthill, deploying its long snout, sticky saliva, and efficient tongue. But he has to eat quickly and moves his tongue up to 150 times a minute.Ants defend themselves with painful stings, so an anteater might spend as little as a minute feasting on each mound. Giant anteaters never destroy a nest, preferring to return and feed again in the future.
These animals don't find their prey by sight - theirs is bad - but by their sense of smell, which is 40 times stronger than that of humans.
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