Fire, Highways and Pesticides: The Triple Threat to Giant Anteaters

Better known for their Pinocchio-like snouts and voracious appetite for ants and termites – of which they consume up to 30 thousand a day – anteaters also play a vital role in their environment. Natural pest controllers and seed dispersers, these solitary animals create watering holes for other species, are important prey for big cats like pumas and recycle nutrients by aerating the soil.

‘They’re unique to Latin America and are one of the oldest mammals,’ President of Brazilian NGO Tamanduá (Anteater) Institute Professor Flávia Miranda – who’s been working with Giant Anteaters for 25 years – tells The Ethicalist. Reaching up to two metres in length, giant anteaters are the largest of the four anteater species, which include arboreal-living silky (or dwarf) anteaters and northern and southern tamanduas.

Tragically, they’re also the most threatened mammal in Central America, and according to Global Conservation, less than 5,000 giant anteaters exist across their historic range, which stretches from Honduras to northern Argentina. These toothless, tree-climbing ‘ant bears’ as they’re nicknamed, are already extinct in Guatemala, El Salvador, Uruguay and Belize.

Anteaters caught in a human-made crisis

‘Fire is their major enemy, as are roads,’ explains Professor Flávia

Once found across all 26 Brazilian states, the country’s shrinking giant anteater population face drought-driven forest fires and factory farming fires deliberately started to clear land. This June saw 2,500 blazes engulf the Pantanal aka the planet’s largest tropical wetland, which extends across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Fuelled by unusually dry, windy and hot conditions, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) points the finger to human-caused climate change.

‘Climate change is the biggest threat for these species,’ Professor Flávia says. One of the most globally important biomes, the Pantanal is home to jaguars, river otters and giant anteaters; whose fuzzy and flammable fur makes them particularly vulnerable to out-of-control blazes.

In 2021, Tamanduá launched its life-saving ‘Orphans of Fire Project’ to rescue giant anteaters literally caught in the line of the Pantanal’s raging infernos. ‘Many orphaned pups were found; their mothers burned or run over. Their mortality was high because they required intensive care,’ Professor Flávia explains. A pup will barely leave its mother’s side in the first two years; using its parent’s giant bushy tail to suckle and shelter under and hitching a ride on its back up to one years old!

‘Today, we have a 24-hour team on duty; bottle feeding every two hours and adaptation areas when the giant anteaters are released from one and a half years of age,’ she adds. Tamanduá monitors the 15 reintroduced orphans – fitted with GPS harnesses – for another two years using telemetry, she explains.

In a sadly all-too-familiar story, human-caused habitat destruction and fragmentation undermines the survival of these sticky-tongued mammals, who inhabit grasslands, dry and tropical forests, savannas and swamps.

Close to 50 per cent of the Cerrado, a vastly overlooked tropical ecosystem located southeast of the Amazon rainforest, has been lost to cash crops and cattle grazing.

‘You’ve got an enormous amount of land in the Cerrado being converted to monocultures of eucalyptus forest for paper production and soy plantations; the bulk of which is being used for animal feed,’ Dr Helen Taylor tells The Ethicalist.

The Conservation Programme Manager for The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) continues, ‘The Cerrado is a scrubby habitat where you’ve got grassland area and then isolated pockets of forest or single trees. These “pockets” are really important for anteaters to regulate their temperature; they seek shade or use them to warm up at night.’

As the animals move around this increasingly splintered landscape, they’re forced to cross busy roads like the wildlife carcass-littered BR-262. Dubbed Brazil’s deadliest highway, it runs like a man-made scar through Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state.

‘Giant anteaters are the third most killed animal in vehicle collisions in this state,’ Dr. Helen reveals. This sobering statistic was generated by RZSS’s long-time Brazilian collaborator: ICAS (The Wild Animal Conservation Institute), who surveyed a 53,000 mile-stretch of paved roadways in Mato Grosso do Sul over the course of three years as part of its ‘Anteaters and Highways Project’.

‘Wildlife-vehicle collisions aren’t just dangerous to wildlife, but people too,’ adds Dr. Helen. Research from ICAS reveals that the single best way to save giant anteaters from becoming roadkill is by building underpasses in combination with road fencing.

Poaching and Pesticides

Roads also open up access to illegal loggers and poachers. Giant anteaters are hunted for their hooked front claws which are used to pull apart ants’ nests and termite mounds in Venezuela. In Bolivia, their leathery hide is used for equestrian equipment, whilst in Guyana, they’re needlessly slaughtered out of superstition and for traditional medicine.

The elusive animals are also perceived as bad omens in parts of the Pantanal according to a research article co-authored by Whitley-Award winning scientist and ICAS founder Arnaud Desbiez.

Brazil’s giant anteaters seem to be bearing the brunt of man’s wrongdoings. Already victims of wildlife trafficking, the ant bears’ newest nemesis is a dirty, and very legal, chemical.

‘This year, we’re truly shocked and surprised by the amount of pesticide use [by farmers] in the Pantanal. We lost four great anteaters to organophosphates [an insecticide used to kill termites] and organochlorines [a pesticide],’ Professor Flávia says. ‘It’s an invisible evil that we were only able to see because they were being monitored every day,’ she continues. As for giant anteaters in parts of the Cerrado, Dr. Helen adds ‘they’re wandering through a landscape heavily dosed with pesticides.’

‘With the warming and the change in the landscape, the diet changes, new diseases like climate-change-induced canine distemper [normally found in carnivores] appear and the adaptation by the giant anteaters to all this change isn’t quick,’ says Professor Flàvia.

Born Survivors

Despite the Professor’s somber words, these remarkable creatures are showing resilience in the face of adversity. In a win for both animal and conservation, in January 2024 a giant anteater was discovered by a biologist in Brazil’s southwestern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the species has been regionally extinct for over a century. It’s believed to be an individual from a population reintroduced to Iberá Park – one of Argentina’s largest wetlands – by Rewilding Argentina.

The NGO has rescued and released 110 giant anteaters from the illegal pet trade and poachers since 2007. Argentina’s bold and borderless giant anteaters ‘will begin to repopulate the areas where they were already extinct,’ she says.

There are heartening stories of hope for these bushy-tailed mammals in the Pantanal and Cerrado ecoregion, too. One of ICAS’ most notable rehabilitation achievements is Heather, a female giant anteater who, after being cared for at the rescue center run by the State Forest Institute (IEF) and Nobilis Fauna in Minas Gerais state, successfully returned to the wild and later came back to the center with a pup on her back. ‘It was almost like she came back to say “hey, look what I did!’” says Dr. Helen.

Meanwhile, in the hot and humid perennial floodplains of the Pantanal, Professor Flávia recalls Tamanduá’s first released orphaned giant anteater, who’s been monitored with GPS tracking telemetry by the team since his return to the wild in August 2021.

‘Tupã [who was found alongside his dead mother] was very brave and managed to establish his territory by fighting with other anteaters. He’s managed to find food and shelter and is doing well today.’

Here’s hoping that with the tireless work by the likes of ICAS and Tamanduá, Heather and Tupã can flourish in the wild without fear of being struck by a truck, poisoned by pesticides or made homeless by crops and cattle.