logo
Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs

Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs

Yahoo6 days ago
If you want to get by in this world, you could do a lot worse than developing a predilection for ants. In fact, ant-eating may be a dramatically overlooked recipe for success.
According to new research, relying on ants as a sole food source has evolved at least 12 times in mammals since the reign of the dinosaurs ended some 66 million years ago. But it's not the ant-exclusive diet itself that is the wonder: it's that it always follows a similar blueprint.
"It's not necessarily surprising that mammals would specialize on ant-eating, as ecological niches almost inevitably get filled," biologist Thomas Vida of the University of Bonn in Germany told ScienceAlert, "but rather that we see the same, or at least very similar, morphological adaptations across so many unrelated groups."
It's one of the most striking examples of convergent evolution, in which dramatically different organisms can come to evolve similar features to solve similar problems.
Related: Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why
There are a lot of ants on planet Earth. A recent study estimated the number of individual ants at around 20 quadrillion, for a combined biomass of 12 megatons of dry carbon. That's more than all the wild mammals and birds combined, and around 20 percent of the human biomass.
It wasn't always this way; just after the dinosaurs went extinct, ants represented less than 1 percent of the insect population, exploding around 23 million years ago at the beginning of the Miocene.
Many animals happily include insects as part of their diet, including mammals. It makes sense: insects are plentiful, and full of nutrition. However, a diet that revolves exclusively around ants – a strategy called obligate myrmecophagy – is a little more rare.
"One of the things my lab focuses on is how social insects like ants and termites have reshaped the history of life on the planet," entomologist Phillip Barden of the New Jersey Institute of Technology told ScienceAlert.
"Ants in particular have altered the trajectory of evolution in lots of insect and plant lineages, but a lingering question that I've had is just how much mammals have had to reckon with the rapid ascent of ants and termites over the last 100 million years. I also just love giant anteaters."
To investigate, Vida, Barden, and their colleague Zachary Calamari of City University of New York undertook a painstaking review of more than 600 published scientific sources to compile a database of the dietary habits of 4,099 mammal species.
The researchers divided these animals into five different categories based on their diets: insectivores, carnivores, omnivores, herbivores, and the obligate myrmecophages. These were then mapped onto an animal family tree to observe how these dietary adaptations emerged over tens of millions of years.
Myrmecophagy, the researchers found, emerged at least 12 times, with 2 more tentative instances that could not be confirmed. This includes animals such as anteaters, pangolins, echidnas, numbats, and aardvarks – a diversity that the researchers did not expect – across all three major mammal groups: placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes.
These animals all developed similar traits to optimize eating ants.
"There are a few obvious things: their skulls and tongues tend to elongate, their teeth often get reduced, and they usually have strong claws/forelimbs for tearing into insect nests," Vida explained.
"There are also some less obvious things, like their low body temperatures/slow metabolisms and their enzymatic adaptations towards digesting chitin, both of which are adaptations for surviving off of abundant, but low-energy food."
The finding is reminiscent of the famous phenomenon whereby crab body plans keep emerging, with at least five separate crab evolutions throughout evolutionary history. Well, crabs are cool and all, but apparently ants are where the real party is at.
Related:
"Ants really seem to be engineers of convergent evolution," Barden said.
"There are twice as many origins of ant- and termite-eating in mammals as there are origins of crab body plans. And that's not even counting the over 10,000 species of arthropods that mimic ant and termite morphology, behavior, or chemical signaling to evade predation or get access to social insect resources."
Their work, the researchers say, lays a solid foundation for future studies of mammalian dietary strategies. Vida notes that their database will allow further investigations of fascinating dietary specializations, and to drill down into the origins of individual myrmecophagous species. There may even be some interesting discoveries waiting in comparative studies of insectivorous birds, reptiles, and amphibians.
"The history of life is full of crossovers. Even very distantly related lineages – social insects and mammals last shared a common ancestor more than 500 million years ago – interact in ways that can kick off striking specializations over tens of millions of years," Barden said.
"As we rapidly reshape our planet, it's important to remember that the loss of any one species may have lots of unexpected consequences."
The research has been published in Evolution.
Related News
A Gaping Hole Full of Milky Blue Water Has Appeared at Yellowstone
Cuisine Fad Unleashes Invasive Threat Into The US Wilderness
Fig Trees That Grow Rocks From Carbon Discovered in Africa
Solve the daily Crossword
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs
Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs

Yahoo

time6 days ago

  • Yahoo

Mammals Have Evolved Into Anteaters at Least 12 Times Since The Dinosaurs

If you want to get by in this world, you could do a lot worse than developing a predilection for ants. In fact, ant-eating may be a dramatically overlooked recipe for success. According to new research, relying on ants as a sole food source has evolved at least 12 times in mammals since the reign of the dinosaurs ended some 66 million years ago. But it's not the ant-exclusive diet itself that is the wonder: it's that it always follows a similar blueprint. "It's not necessarily surprising that mammals would specialize on ant-eating, as ecological niches almost inevitably get filled," biologist Thomas Vida of the University of Bonn in Germany told ScienceAlert, "but rather that we see the same, or at least very similar, morphological adaptations across so many unrelated groups." It's one of the most striking examples of convergent evolution, in which dramatically different organisms can come to evolve similar features to solve similar problems. Related: Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why There are a lot of ants on planet Earth. A recent study estimated the number of individual ants at around 20 quadrillion, for a combined biomass of 12 megatons of dry carbon. That's more than all the wild mammals and birds combined, and around 20 percent of the human biomass. It wasn't always this way; just after the dinosaurs went extinct, ants represented less than 1 percent of the insect population, exploding around 23 million years ago at the beginning of the Miocene. Many animals happily include insects as part of their diet, including mammals. It makes sense: insects are plentiful, and full of nutrition. However, a diet that revolves exclusively around ants – a strategy called obligate myrmecophagy – is a little more rare. "One of the things my lab focuses on is how social insects like ants and termites have reshaped the history of life on the planet," entomologist Phillip Barden of the New Jersey Institute of Technology told ScienceAlert. "Ants in particular have altered the trajectory of evolution in lots of insect and plant lineages, but a lingering question that I've had is just how much mammals have had to reckon with the rapid ascent of ants and termites over the last 100 million years. I also just love giant anteaters." To investigate, Vida, Barden, and their colleague Zachary Calamari of City University of New York undertook a painstaking review of more than 600 published scientific sources to compile a database of the dietary habits of 4,099 mammal species. The researchers divided these animals into five different categories based on their diets: insectivores, carnivores, omnivores, herbivores, and the obligate myrmecophages. These were then mapped onto an animal family tree to observe how these dietary adaptations emerged over tens of millions of years. Myrmecophagy, the researchers found, emerged at least 12 times, with 2 more tentative instances that could not be confirmed. This includes animals such as anteaters, pangolins, echidnas, numbats, and aardvarks – a diversity that the researchers did not expect – across all three major mammal groups: placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes. These animals all developed similar traits to optimize eating ants. "There are a few obvious things: their skulls and tongues tend to elongate, their teeth often get reduced, and they usually have strong claws/forelimbs for tearing into insect nests," Vida explained. "There are also some less obvious things, like their low body temperatures/slow metabolisms and their enzymatic adaptations towards digesting chitin, both of which are adaptations for surviving off of abundant, but low-energy food." The finding is reminiscent of the famous phenomenon whereby crab body plans keep emerging, with at least five separate crab evolutions throughout evolutionary history. Well, crabs are cool and all, but apparently ants are where the real party is at. Related: "Ants really seem to be engineers of convergent evolution," Barden said. "There are twice as many origins of ant- and termite-eating in mammals as there are origins of crab body plans. And that's not even counting the over 10,000 species of arthropods that mimic ant and termite morphology, behavior, or chemical signaling to evade predation or get access to social insect resources." Their work, the researchers say, lays a solid foundation for future studies of mammalian dietary strategies. Vida notes that their database will allow further investigations of fascinating dietary specializations, and to drill down into the origins of individual myrmecophagous species. There may even be some interesting discoveries waiting in comparative studies of insectivorous birds, reptiles, and amphibians. "The history of life is full of crossovers. Even very distantly related lineages – social insects and mammals last shared a common ancestor more than 500 million years ago – interact in ways that can kick off striking specializations over tens of millions of years," Barden said. "As we rapidly reshape our planet, it's important to remember that the loss of any one species may have lots of unexpected consequences." The research has been published in Evolution. Related News A Gaping Hole Full of Milky Blue Water Has Appeared at Yellowstone Cuisine Fad Unleashes Invasive Threat Into The US Wilderness Fig Trees That Grow Rocks From Carbon Discovered in Africa Solve the daily Crossword

Breaking: Major Antimatter Discovery May Help Solve Mystery of Existence
Breaking: Major Antimatter Discovery May Help Solve Mystery of Existence

Yahoo

time16-07-2025

  • Yahoo

Breaking: Major Antimatter Discovery May Help Solve Mystery of Existence

We're now a step closer to understanding how the Universe avoided an antimatter apocalypse. CERN scientists have discovered tantalizing clues of a fundamental difference in the way physics handles matter and antimatter. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have verified an asymmetry between matter and antimatter forms of a particle called a baryon. Known as a charge-parity (CP) violation, the effect has only previously been detected in another class of particles, called mesons. But experimental evidence in baryons, which make up the bulk of the Universe's matter, is something physicists have been long hunting for. "It shows that the subtle differences between matter and antimatter exist in a wider range of particles, indicating that the fundamental laws of physics treat baryons and antibaryons differently," Xueting Yang, CERN physicist and first author of the study, told ScienceAlert. Related: "The matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe requires CP violation in baryons, such that the discovery is a key step forward in testing how complete our current theory is, and in exploring whether new physics might be hiding in places we haven't looked closely enough before." To make the discovery, the team analyzed around 80,000 particle decay events in data gathered at the LHC between 2011 and 2018. Focussing on particles called lambda-beauty (Λb) baryons and their antimatter counterparts, the researchers searched for any hint of a difference in the way they decayed. If CP was symmetrical, both the matter and antimatter forms of the particle should decay into the same – if mirrored – products. However, the team found a 2.5 percent relative difference between the matter and antimatter baryon decays. "This may sound small, but the results are statistically significant enough," says Yang. "It shows that Λb and anti-Λb do not decay in exactly the same way, providing an observation of CP violation in baryons." Importantly, the find reached a statistical significance of 5.2 sigma. That means the chance that the observed effect comes from random fluctuations is just 1 in 10 million. The discovery has major implications for physics – including questions as fundamental as "why are we here?" Despite its eerie name, antimatter should be mundane. Its main difference from regular matter is having the opposite charge. But that seemingly minor detail means that if ever the two shall meet, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy. In theory, the Big Bang shouldn't have favored one over the other, creating both matter and antimatter in equal amounts. And if that was the case, the entire contents of the Universe should have blasted itself into oblivion in the first few moments of existence, leaving the cosmos a profoundly empty place. Since that obviously didn't happen, it seems some unknown factor intervened so that slightly more matter was created than antimatter. Everything that exists today – from galaxies to grains of sand – are made of that tiny fraction that survived early annihilation. In a simple Universe, inverting both the charge and spatial coordinates of a particle – basically, whether it's matter or antimatter – shouldn't change how it behaves under the laws of physics. This concept is known as CP symmetry, and while it was once considered as immutable as the conservation of energy, some level of CP violation has been predicted by the Standard Model of physics since the mid-20th century. "CP violation is one of the essential ingredients needed to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry. However, physicists estimate that the amount of CP violation in nature must be much larger than what's predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics," said Yang. "This strongly suggests that new physics beyond the Standard Model must exist, providing additional sources of CP violation. Studying CP violation in different systems, including baryons, provides an important test of the Standard Model and could offer hints of new physics beyond it." For instance, there was a chance that antimatter could be repelled by gravity rather than attracted – meaning it would fall upwards. To test the idea, CERN physicists previously conducted 'drop' tests and found that antimatter does fall down, like regular matter. In that respect, there was no CP violation. But the new detection reveals that something does cause matter and antimatter to decay in different ways. This long-awaited confirmation is exciting – but it's still not enough. "The CP violation observed in baryon decays – like in the new LHCb result – is consistent with Standard Model predictions, so it does not provide enough CP violation to solve the matter-antimatter puzzle on its own," says Yang. "But it opens a new window into how CP violation behaves in the baryon sector, which was largely unexplored." "Physicists are looking for new sources of CP violation, beyond what the Standard Model of particle physics predicts. Discovering such sources could lead to new physics." The research was published in the journal Nature. Related News The World's First Nuclear Explosion Created a Rare Form of Matter Sound of Earth's Flipping Magnetic Field Haunts Again From 780,000 Years Ago Extreme Conditions of Early Universe Recreated in Collider Experiment Solve the daily Crossword

Osteoarchaeologist Uncovers Shocking Link Between Brain Condition and Neanderthals
Osteoarchaeologist Uncovers Shocking Link Between Brain Condition and Neanderthals

Yahoo

time16-07-2025

  • Yahoo

Osteoarchaeologist Uncovers Shocking Link Between Brain Condition and Neanderthals

Modern humans may owe more to Neanderthals than just a few genetic quirks, and in at least one case, that inheritance might come with serious health risks. A new study suggests that Chiari malformation type I, a brain abnormality that affects up to 1 in 100 people, may be tied to DNA inherited from Neanderthals. The condition happens when the lower part of the brain extends into the spinal canal, often causing severe headaches, neck pain, and other complications. Researchers had long suspected that interbreeding between Homo sapiens and ancient hominin species could play a role in the shape mismatch between the brain and skull that leads to this defect. But this new research points a finger squarely at Neanderthals, not other early human relatives like Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis. Led by osteoarchaeologist Kimberly Plomp at the University of the Philippines, Science Alert reports the team used 3D modeling and skull shape analysis on more than 100 modern human skulls, comparing those with Chiari malformation to those without. They also examined eight fossil skulls from ancient species, including Neanderthals. Their finding? Only the skulls of Neanderthals showed a similarity to the bone structure of modern people with Chiari malformations, especially in the area where the brain meets the spine. This challenges an earlier theory from 2013 that broadly connected the defect to multiple ancient human species. Instead, researchers now propose what they're calling the Neanderthal Introgression Hypothesis, suggesting the condition may trace specifically back to Neanderthal ancestry. The next step is expanding the study to include more skull samples and testing across different populations. Since African groups have far less Neanderthal DNA than European or Asian groups, future research could reveal patterns in how widespread the condition is based on genetic inheritance. Ultimately, understanding this ancient connection could offer new insight into diagnosing and possibly preventing Chiari malformations. The researchers believe their methods could help unravel the causes of the condition and lead to better treatment Uncovers Shocking Link Between Brain Condition and Neanderthals first appeared on Men's Journal on Jul 16, 2025

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store