What Do Aardvarks Eat? Ants, Termites and a Hidden Cucumber

Ants and termites: the aardvark’s main food

The aardvark is one of the most specialized insect eaters in Africa. Scientists call this kind of diet myrmecophagy, which simply means “ant eating”. Both ants and termites are on the menu, and the balance between them changes with place and season.

Studies in the dry Karoo of South Africa found that ants, especially a common species of pugnacious ant (Anoplolepis custodiens), made up most of the diet for much of the year. In winter, when ants were less active, aardvarks ate more termites, particularly grass-harvesting termites of the genus Trinervitermes. Aardvarks seem to avoid some aggressive ants, such as African driver ants.

Termites feed on wood, grass and dead plant material, and their colonies can hold huge numbers of workers. For an aardvark, a busy mound is a rich, concentrated meal. Read more in what do termites eat?.

How does an aardvark find its food?

Aardvarks forage at night, usually starting after sunset and staying most active during the first part of the night. An aardvark walks a zigzag path with its nose close to the ground and its long ears pointing forward, using both smell and hearing to detect insects. Its sense of smell is exceptional, and it may pause to scrape a shallow, V-shaped trench and sniff at the loose soil.

A foraging aardvark typically covers a few kilometers in a night and sometimes much farther. Aardvarks often do not raid the same nest again for several days, which may give colonies time to recover.

They also take advantage of termites on the move. Some termite species travel above ground in long columns at night to collect grass, and an aardvark can lick them up with little effort.

Digging in with claws and tongue

When an aardvark finds a colony, it digs in with its front feet, whose four toes carry thick, spade-like claws. These can break through the crust of termite mounds that bake almost as hard as concrete in the sun. While digging, the aardvark closes its nostrils, which are fringed with dense hair, to keep out dust and insects.

The tongue is long, thin and coated with sticky saliva from large salivary glands in the neck. It flicks into tunnels and chambers and pulls out insects by the hundreds. An aardvark can collect tens of thousands of insects in one night, and some reports put the total as high as about 50,000. Learn how termites build those tough homes in how do termites build mounds?.

The aardvark cucumber

The most surprising part of the aardvark diet is a plant. The aardvark cucumber (Cucumis humifructus) is a trailing vine of tropical and southern African savannas. Unusually for a member of the cucumber family, its young fruits start above ground on stalks that then bend and push them into the soil, where the fruit grows and ripens underground, about 30–90 cm (1–3 ft) deep.

Aardvarks dig up and eat the fruit, mainly for its water. The seeds pass through the aardvark’s gut and are left in its droppings, which aardvarks bury near their burrows. The loose, fertile soil there gives the seeds a good start. Because the fruit is buried so deep, the plant seems to depend on aardvarks to spread its seeds.

Some biologists think the aardvark cucumber may help explain why the aardvark still has cheek teeth, unlike other ant-eating mammals such as anteaters and pangolins, which have no teeth at all.

Do aardvarks need to chew?

Aardvarks swallow most insects whole. Adults have only a few peg-like, rootless cheek teeth at the back of the jaw, which grow throughout life because they have no enamel and wear down. The real grinding happens in a muscular part of the stomach that works like the gizzard of a bird, crushing insects together with swallowed sand and soil.

How diet shapes aardvark life

Because ants and termites are spread out and vary through the year, aardvarks need large home ranges and lead solitary lives. Young aardvarks start eating insects within a couple of months and are weaned at about three to four months.

Dependence on insects also makes aardvarks vulnerable to drought. In the Kalahari, during a severe drought, researchers following tagged aardvarks found that most of them starved as ants and termites became scarce. Hungry aardvarks also switch from night to daytime feeding, a sign of stress. Ant-eating mammals elsewhere face similar challenges; compare their feeding styles in is an aardvark an anteater?.