Tamandua || Description and Facts!
Channel: Animals Descriptions
Date: 2020-12-04

Tamandua is a genus of anteaters with two species: the southern tamandua (T. tetradactyla) and the northern tamandua (T. mexicana). They live in forests and grasslands, are semiarboreal, and possess partially prehensile tails. They mainly eat ants and termites, but they occasionally eat bees, beetles, and insect larvae. In captivity, they will eat fruits and meat. They have no teeth and depend on their powerful gizzards to break down their food.

Tamanduas have tapered heads with a long, tubular snout, small eyes, and protruding ears. Their tapered mouths house a tongue reaching upwards of 40 cm (16 in) in length. The tail is hairless and pink in color, marked with an irregular pattern of black blotches. The forefeet possess four clawed digits, the third digit bearing the largest claw, while the hind feet have five digits.

Their fur is thick, bristly, yellowish-white to fawn in color, often with a broad black lateral band, covering nearly the whole of the side of their bodies. Northern tamanduas are marked with a black V on their backs and a "vest" over their torso, while southern tamanduas in the lowest part of their range are considerably lighter in color and may have only the V.

The tamanduas are nocturnal, active at night and secreting away in hollow tree trunks and burrows abandoned by other animals during daylight hours. They can spend more than half of their time in the treetops, as much as 64%, where they forage for arboreal ants and termites. Tamanduas move rather awkwardly on the ground and are incapable of galloping like their relative, the giant anteater. Tamanduas walk on the sides of their clenched forefeet to avoid injuring their palms with their sharp claws.

===================================================

Follow me on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/animalsdescriptions/?hl=bg

Subscribe on: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ9vV7DHdXCj95dvYhGRbRg?sub_confirmation=1

===================================================

This presentation contains images that were used under a Creative Commons License. Click here to see the full list of images and attributions:

https://link.attribute.to/cc/1634147

Source from Wikipedia under WP:CC BY-SA license

#Shorts #tamandua #anteater #animals