Question 1001: Animal with the most bizarre long tongue on the planet?

For many animals, a long tongue has become a very effective tool in capturing prey to maintain survival.
Bears eat ants

Bear eat ants for a body length of 150cm but has a tongue up to 60cm long. True to its name, the bear eats ants, this bear eats ants, termites and a long, sticky tongue with small spines is a very effective “tool” in catching prey. With the speed of releasing and retracting the tongue up to 150 times / minute, ant-eating bears can catch up to 30,000 termites per day.

Ants’ stomachs have a special structure that can crush large numbers of ants and termites, helping to facilitate digestion. This stomach produces formic acid instead of the hydrochloric acid commonly found in other mammals.

Bear eat ants have poor eyesight, but the ability to smell very sharp, 40 times more than humans. They use their noses to find food. The body temperature of the ant-eating bear was 32.7 ° C, which is lower than that of other placenta, mammals. If living in the wild, ant-eating bears can last 15 years and 25 years if kept in captivity.

The bear eats pregnant ants for 190 days and gives birth to only one baby per litter. A bear that eats ants will stay with her mother for two years until the bear that eats the ant is pregnant again. In the first year of life, the bear eats the mother ants and will carry the baby on her back.

Bats suck honey

The honey-sucking bat is one of the famous bats for its long tongue. Its long tongue when retracted was hidden in the chest.

A species of bat with a tube-shaped mouth specializing in nectar absorption, or known as Anoura fistulata has the longest tongue of any mammal on the planet. The tongue of this exotic animal is about 8.5 cm long, 1.5 times its body length. According to Iflscience, this particular species of bat broke the record for the first bat species in Ecuado decades ago.

Now, according to the Association for the Conservation of Wildlife, a strange species of bat has been found for the first time in Bolivia’s Madidi National Park. This unusual tongue allows them to easily suck nectar from the ends of a funnel-shaped flower. This is also an effective way to pollinate this elongated flower.

In fact, with a tongue almost twice the length of its body, there is no animal in the natural world that has “overtaken” the long ratio of the tongue to the body of this bats.

Pangolin

Pangolins have a tongue up to 40cm long with a lot of sticky drool to easily catch prey. Its tongue stalks deep in the abdomen. This animal has no feathers, only a hard scaly covering its body, and also has no teeth. The pangolin’s food is mainly ants and termites.

British naturalist David Attenborough chose the Sunda pangolin (a species of pangolin distributed throughout Southeast Asia) as one of the 10 species he wants to rescue from the most endangered.

So what makes pangolins so special? Here are facts to help us understand more about one of the most endangered species on Earth.

Currently in the world there are about 8 species of pangolin in existence, and some species have been extinct during evolution over the past 80 million years. Four of them live in Asia: China, Malaysia, India and Palawan Island (Philippines), while the remaining 4 species are distributed in Africa.

When fully stretched, the pangolin’s tongue can be up to 40cm long and the base of the tongue is deep in the chest cavity. The pangolins use their sticky tongues to catch insects. Because pangolins have no teeth, they crush and digest food with stones in the stomach.

The scales of pangolins are mainly composed of keratin, similar to human nails, rhino horn or bird nails … The horn scales account for 20% of the weight of this animal. The very hard scales can protect pangolins from predators. However, in traditional Chinese medicine, people dry and roast pangolin scales because they believe they can cure polio, stimulate lactation for women … For that reason, the price of pangolin scales on the black market amounted to more than 3,000 USD / kg.