In a time when people are being asked to consider eating insects, we should, perhaps, learn a thing or two from the aardvark (Orycteropus afer), Africa’s ant-guzzling gourmand. On an average night, the big-schnozzed mammal devours up to 50,000 of the crunchy critters.
Save for the occasional ‘aardvark cucumber’ – more on them later– aardvarks dine exclusively on ants and termites.
And why not? Ants and termites have a collective biomass that’s 10 times greater than that of all wild mammals – there’s plenty of them around to eat, in other words.
Aardvarks, who also go by the name of African ant bears, have a special knack for this. In search of a snack, aardvarks must first break into an ant nest or termite mound.
Stocky leg bones, reinforced with compacted connective tissue, help to absorb the strain of digging, as sturdy claws rip their way into the robust repository.
This enrages the ants, which may swarm, bite or spray formic acid at the intruder. The aardvark is blessed with thick skin, however. Shrugging them off, it buries its long, pig-like snout into the nest and slurps the ants up like a milkshake.
And to avoid inhaling dust, the aardvark closes its nostrils. Meanwhile, specialised salivary glands, which almost completely surround the animal’s neck, release a flood of sticky spittle that coats the animal’s 30cm-long (12in) tongue like glue.
Ants stick to their tongue, like flies stick to fly paper, but the adaptations don’t stop there. Once swallowed and shunted further along the digestive system, the food arrives in a gizzard-like stomach, where muscly walls grind it up.
Little, if any, chewing is required, but that doesn’t stop the aardvark from having some very weird teeth. Adults have around 20 peg-like gnashers, all at the back of the jaw, which are constantly growing and being worn down.
Each one is a cluster of hundreds of tiny, hexagonal, parallel tubes, made of a dentine-like substance called vasodentine.
Lacking enamel, the teeth are relatively soft. This makes them rubbish for crushing, but perfect for lightly mashing the aforementioned aardvark cucumber.
The cucumber is the satsuma-sized fruiting body of a low-growing vine whose life cycle depends on the aardvark ripening its seeds in its belly, then dispersing them via its poo. In return, the aardvark gets a juicy, water-laden snack, and a cucumber named after it!
What’s not so weird, perhaps, is that ant-eating mammals, such as aardvarks, anteaters and pangolins, have evolved not once, not twice, but 12 times since the demise of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago.
This is a classic case of convergent evolution, the phenomenon where different species in different places at different times independently evolve similar characteristics.
Faced with the same problem – how to eat all these ants – they all developed sticky tongues and strong forearms, and reduced their number of teeth.
Ant-eating mammals, it seems, are a recurring trend that keeps coming back – a bit like the mullet, only with more self-awareness.
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