Anteaters Have Evolved More Than a Dozen Times
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YOr may not find tasty ants and termites, but many animals have evolving history: it turns out that ants of ants have evolved independently more than 12 times in the past 66 years. But how did the species that have exclusively dined on termites, ants or both emerged so many times?
To eliminate this mystery of mammals, the researchers have drawn up the evolutionary history of these eating creatures of ants and long -term ending, called myrmecophages. They suggest that the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period opened the way for myrmecophages, which include anti-ardvarks, pangolins and tattoo species, according to an article recently published in Evolution. While the sun was sleeping on the Cretaceous, non -avian dinosaurs, among many animals and plant species, have disappeared and the earth began to turn into an ideal ecosystem for ants and termites.
“While some species have evolved defenses to avoid these insects, others have adopted the opposite approach – if you cannot beat them, eat them,” said study author Phillip Barden, an evolving biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in a press release.
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Today, the combined biomass of termites and ants is greater than that of all living wild mammals, and there are 20 surviving species of “real” hard core myrmiles, including warnings, pangolins and anti-mansions. They have signing characteristics for dinner in an expert manner on these insects, such as long claws and languages before to dig and slurping, and suck up hundreds of thousands of insects per day.
To learn when – and how much – characteristics have evolved, Barden and its co -authors have examined a large mine of data on diets of more than 4,000 species of mammals.
After having placed these mammals on a family tree, the researchers exploited statistical models to reconstruct their ancestral diet. This revealed that myrmecophagy had arisen more than a dozen times in a variety of mammal lines. Even if the evolution has reached the ants several times, it is a fairly rare way of life in terms of number of mammals species that really participate: eight of these myrmecophagous lines are each represented by a single distinct species.
All mammals eaten of ants have evolved from carnivores or insectivores, the team learned. They also noted that myrmecophagy has evolved more than once in each of the main groups of mammals, but some seemed to be more “predisposedly predisposed” to the subsistence of ants and termites.
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Unlike food trends in people, researchers have noticed that myrmecophagous mammals tend to stick to this habit – except for a kind of elephant musaraigne, which ultimately went to the omnivoire.
And although they are quite picky on food, myrmecophages could have an advantage in a warming world. “In some respects, specializing in ants and termites paints a species in a corner,” said Barden. “But as long as social insects dominate global biomass, these mammals can have an advantage, especially because climate change seems to promote species with massive colonies, such as fire ants and other invasive social insects.”
Lead image: Adamardn / Shutterstock
