Mammals Evolved into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since Dinosaur Age, Study Finds

https://news.njit.edu/mammals-evolved-ant-eaters-12-times-dinosaur-age-study-finds

by zdw • 1 year ago

82 45 1 year ago

news.njit.edu

hammock• 1 year ago

The weight of all ants on Earth is roughly equal to the weight of all humans- aka there are a lot of ants. And can be found everywhere mammals are able to live. So they make sense as a food source

ants_everywhere3• 1 year ago

aka there are a lot of ants

This is true

nvader• 1 year ago

And easier to predate on at scale than humans.

fireattack• 1 year ago

You mean "i.e." I believe

jbotz2• 1 year ago

While comparing things... a colony of leaf-cutter ants (which form some of the largest colonies with as many as 2 million individuals when the colony is mature) has roughly the same metabolic rate as cow (easily measured from the CO2 at the exits of their nest). So don't think of ants as tiny animals, think of ant colonies as fairly large animals.

veunes3• 1 year ago

From an evolutionary standpoint, it totally makes sense to adapt around that buffet

fnordsensei• 1 year ago

We should be eating more ants, it seems like a largely untapped source of protein then.

Scaevolus• 1 year ago

ant biomass is estimated to be 20% of human biomass, so it's remarkably close https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201550119

perdomon• 1 year ago

You may not like it, but this is what peak mammalian performance looks like.

PlunderBunny• 1 year ago

Ant eater pickup line.

harimau777• 1 year ago

At the end of all things, when evolution has reached its inevitable end, all that will be left is a war between ant eaters and crabs.

0cf8612b2e1e• 1 year ago

Ant eating crabs.

washadjeffmad• 1 year ago

Crab eating ants.

We'll kill the ones that eat us and eat the ones we kill.

account-5• 1 year ago

I think cockroaches might have something to say about this.

cloudbonsai• 1 year ago

At the end of all things, when evolution has reached its inevitable end, all that will be left is a war between ant eaters and crabs.

From reading the aritcle, it seems that ants are really crappy as an energy source:

  One thing myrmecophages share is an almost insatiable appetite — ants and termites are so low in energy that even a small animal like the numbat must eat about 20,000 termites a day

I think this explains why Anteaters spend most of their day doing nothing but sleep -- they barely get enough calories from eating ants.

TMWNN• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-F1L8XfTrI

Qem• 1 year ago

Did any anteater dinosaurs exist before that?

frutiger• 1 year ago

Ant eating dinosaurs exist today: https://learnbirdwatching.com/birds-that-eat-ants/

mykarakus• 1 year ago

I'm disappointed to not see chickens there! I like thinking of them as little descendants of dinosaurs.

juancn• 1 year ago

A bit like [carcinisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation) for crustaceans

icambron• 1 year ago

Another one is, believe it or not, trees: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

o11c• 1 year ago

Trees really aren't a good example of convergent evolution. The evidence tends more toward "all plants have woodiness genes, and sometimes those genes can be activated/deactivated".

Fruits are, though.

anticensor• 1 year ago

And then you have trenacisation for transportation systems.

bokchop• 1 year ago

I can see the shear abundance of ants tilting the scale of evolution's nonlinearity.

Reminds me of Mitch Hedberg, ~"[Ants are] great if you're ever really hungry and want to eat 2000 of something."

konstantinua00• 1 year ago

how many times things evolved into sharks?

ichtiozaur, dolphin/orca

anything else?

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

Beyond ichthyosaurs and cetaceans, carcharhinification (shark-like convergent evolution) also occurred in plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, certain teleost fish like barracuda, and even the extinct thalattosuchian crocodylomorphs.

adrian_b2• 1 year ago

Jurassic-Cretaceous marine crocodiles (like also ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs) looked like sharks, i.e. they depended mostly on their caudal fin for swimming.

On the other hand, there was no resemblance between sharks and plesiosaurs or pliosaurs. The latter swimmed using their lateral fins, somewhat like marine turtles and penguins, not like sharks. Also the dentition of plesiosaurs and pliosaurs had no similarity to sharks, so except for being big predators there were no resemblances between them.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

I guess we’ll see if they have the endurance. Sharks have been around for a while after all. But, Orca have surpassed sharks in terms of badassery, right? And it isn’t that close. They aren’t evolving into sharks, they are the upgrade!

adrian_b2• 1 year ago

The mosasaurs also developed a caudal fin (vertical, like sharks and ichthyosaurs, not horizontal like whales and dolphins) and eventually they became quite shark-like, though not as fish-like as ichthyosaurs.

Between ichthyosaurs (who evolved in Triassic) and mosasaurs (who evolved in Cretaceous) there existed also a group of marine crocodiles (Metriorhynchidae; who evolved in Jurassic), which also had caudal fins and were quite shark-like.

So there have been at least 4 groups of amniotes that looked like sharks, cetaceans among mammals and at least 3 groups of diapsids.

However all these marine predators looked like sharks from the point of view of locomotion, but none of them had the kind of teeth specialized for cutting that are characteristic for sharks. Teeth resembling those of sharks are found only among some other fish, e.g. piranhas, whose bodies do not resemble sharks.

conradev• 1 year ago

  an aardwolf can hunt up to 300,000 in a single night

That’s a new one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardwolf

andrewstuart• 1 year ago

Things evolve to eat delicious things.

doodlebugging• 1 year ago

If you take Woody Guthrie's old story about rabbits hiding from the dogs [0] and change rabbits to ants and dogs to mammals you have the evolutionary tale of the ant.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO9DYVRUT58

michaelhoney• 1 year ago

Top-shelf HN thread! So far I have learned:

- the evolved 12-times thing

- ants are descended from wasps

- insectivorous aardwolves

what a day

veunes3• 1 year ago

Now I can't stop picturing a wasp slowly turning into an ant

veunes3• 1 year ago

Kind of wild to think that ants and termites became so successful post-dinosaurs that mammals just kept re-inventing themselves to eat them

tim333• 1 year ago

I sometimes think how AI will change things on evolutionary time scales. We've had hundreds of millions of years of evolving reproducing DNA coming up with different body types being the main thing going on on earth and now we'll have a new digital life like thing going forward.

Mammals Evolved into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since Dinosaur Age, Study Finds

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