Orycteropus afer
The anteater or oricteropo (Orycteropus afer) is a species of tubulidentate mammal of the Orycteropodidae family native to Africa, where it lives in savannahs and wooded areas where it finds food. It is a solitary and nocturnal animal. It is the only living species of tubulidentate, although other fossil species are known. It is considered a living fossil because it preserves primitive characteristics that have been lost in more advanced eutherians, such as the presence of ten chromosomes.
Their similarity to American anteaters and pangolins is only apparent and due to evolutionary convergence. All have developed adaptations to their feeding style of directly attacking ant and termite nests, such as a very long tongue and specially modified teeth. The closest relatives of the aardvark are the elephant shrews along with sirenids, hyracoids, tenrecs, and elephants.
Etymology
Despite its name, the relationship of the aardvark to true pigs is very distant. When the first Dutch settlers arrived in South Africa at the end of the 17th century and saw the animal for the first time, they found it to resemble a a domestic pig and was given the name aardvark, meaning "earth pig". That is the name it receives in English, but it has evolved in both Dutch and Afrikaans, languages in which it is currently called aardvarken and erdvark respectively. This semantic relationship with pigs has been transmitted to other languages, such as Spanish or French, although the name oryctérope is much more common in that language than the calc cochon de earth.
The scientific name Orycteropus is a Latin construction formed from the Greek terms ὀρυκτήρ, oryktḗr, "digger" and πούς, poús, "feet". This scientific name was given to it in reference to its habit of digging burrows. Some languages have adopted a derivative form to refer to the aardvark. It is not clear if the generic name was coined by É. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1791 or by Cuvier in 1798. The species had already been described previously in 1766 by Pallas under the name Myrmecophaga afra.
Afer is a Latin term, meaning "African": it refers to the geographic origin of the aardvark.
Description
Variously pig-like, brown above and reddish below, with a stocky body and arched back. This digitigrate animal has short but strong front legs. The posterior ones have five fingers each, but the anterior ones lack a thumb. The fingers have large nails in the shape of a flattened spade, halfway between paws and hooves. They typically weigh between 40 and 65 kg, with a median length of between 1 and 1.3 meters, although they can reach up to 2.2 in length. It has a pig-like snout and strong claws.
It has a tough skin with sparse bristly hair. This hair is darker on the legs and lighter in color on the body, although it is often soiled with dirt. The eyes are surrounded by a series of hairs that have a sensory function. They are color blind, which which does not present a problem given his nocturnal habits. His eyesight is poor, evidenced by the fact that he frequently bumps into trees and other obstacles when running. One of the most distinctive characters of the tubulidentates is the dental structure, which gives the order its name. Instead of having a pulp cavity, teeth present an agglomeration of thin, straight, parallel tubes made of vasodentin (a modified type of dentin) with compacted individual pulp canals. Teeth lack enamel, so they are constantly worn down and regenerated, and they have no root. Aardvarks are born with normal incisors and canines in front of the mandible, which later fall out without being replaced. Adults only have molars and premolars at the back of the jaw. The dental formula is:
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Due to the diet of aardvarks, the jaw is endowed with only weak muscles. The median life expectancy of the species in the wild is not known, although in captivity they live for about 25 years. There is a known case of an aardvark, named Kikuyu, who died at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium at the age of 30.
Behavior
Aardvarks are primarily nocturnal animals. They dig their burrows by repeatedly flexing and extending their front legs and using all four toes to dig up soil. They create a network of temporary homes in their territory and a main burrow that they use to reproduce. The main burrow can be deep and extensive, with several narrowed entrances and a length of up to 13 metres, while smaller burrows can be so small that the animal's head can hardly fit through. However, the burrows are often austere. and the only "comfort" it is a bed of loose soil. The aardvark periodically changes the configuration of the main burrow and occasionally moves to create another. This is useful for a multitude of animals from tsetse flies to warthogs to wild dogs, which take advantage of abandoned burrows for shelter. Aardvarks are solitary, only sharing the same burrow between a mother and her young, even in areas with a high population density the different individuals will live without sharing burrows.
They are fearful and solitary animals. It comes to the surface at night and, then, it travels its territory (10-30 km). It uses its keen sense of smell to track down ants and termites, which it feeds on (myrmecophagy). When it discovers an ant or termite nest, it excavates it with its powerful forelimbs. Although it moves quite slowly, it is capable of digging quite quickly. Like the pangolin, its claws allow it to break the extremely hard crust of anthills and termite mounds while closing its nose to keep out dust. Once it has overcome the insect's external defenses, its tough skin protects it from ant and termite bites while it ingests huge numbers of insects with its long, sticky tongue, up to 30 cm in length. insects, which are caught by ridges on the roof of the mouth when the tongue comes out again. They can eat up to 50,000 insects in one night.
In difficult times, aardvarks can supplement their diet with small animals such as mice, beetle larvae, locusts, or mushrooms, and melon seeds.
Aardvarks also have very keen hearing, thanks to their long, upright ears. When they go down to their underground burrows, they conveniently fold their ears so they don't get in the way.
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Males only approach females to mate during mating season. This, together with the fact that they cover greater distances than females, suggests that they are polygamous animals. Little is known about the early stages of pregnancy, but it is known that after seven months a single calf is usually born (despite that two can also be born). In the wild, births have been observed in a period that begins in May and can last between June and November depending on the geographical area, while specimens in captivity give birth at any time of the year (especially in February, March and June). The neonate weighs about 2 kg and measures approximately 55 cm. He is born highly developed, bald and toothless but with highly developed paws, and is able to leave the burrow to join his mother after only two weeks. The hair starts to come out after five or six weeks. At the age of fourteen weeks, the young eat termites and weaning occurs two weeks later. At six months, aardvarks are capable of digging their own burrows, although they often remain with the mother until the next mating season. They reach sexual maturity around the age of six months and at the end of their first year of life they already have the size of an adult.
Distribution
The aardvark lives in Africa, south of the Sahara desert, except in the Namib. Ancient Egyptian paintings suggest that it may have reached the Mediterranean in the past. A minority of Egyptologists believe that the head of the god Egyptian Seth, which belongs to an unidentified animal, is actually that of an aardvark. Other more widespread theories say that Seth's head was that of an ass or some kind of canid. Unreliable sources from British colonial times relate that aardvarks were hunted in present-day Iraq, suggesting that northern Saharan populations may have survived into more recent times.
Subspecies
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Miscellaneous
On January 14, 2013, the first specimen was born in Spain, specifically in the Bioparc Valencia zoo.
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