Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Ever feel like you’re being watched by six-legged communists with a hive mind and an insatiable craving for drywall? Same. One of them winked at me yesterday. I caught a bunch of them dragging a Dorito into a storm drain and chanting in perfect iambic pentameter. I think they’ve made contact with the radioactive wasps. But I digress.
Once upon a time, dinosaurs took a meteor to the face and called it a day. In the smoldering aftermath, mammals rose up and asked themselves the eternal evolutionary question: “Why am I not eating all these goddamn ants? What if I had a long nose, no teeth, and lived solely off ground bugs?” I guess that’s two eternal evolutionary questions, my bad.
I don't think he was ant-icipating the paparazzi. (pascalegueret/depositphotos)
Scientists have now confirmed that the answer to both questions has been “YES” at least twelve separate times. Evolution is apparently stuck in a loop where every few million years, some poor mammal wakes up, stares at a termite mound, and just knows it’s time to get weird with it and chow down. It seems evolution has the creativity of a reboot-happy Hollywood executive: “Let’s do Anteater, but gritty this time.”
They call it “myrmecophagy,” but let’s be real, it’s basically ant addiction. It’s the evolutionary equivalent of your cousin who keeps quitting his job to become a DJ, except in this case, the DJ booth is a dirt pile full of screaming insects, and the beats are just chewing noises.
You might be thinking, “Well maybe ants are just really delicious.” And they are, assuming you’re into snacks that bite back and taste like spicy nightmares. But ants and termites aren’t just tasty. They’re also goddamn everywhere. Their combined biomass outweighs all other animals combined. Globally, termites alone outweigh every wild mammal by a factor of 10, which means if you smooshed every termite mound in the world together, you could build a termite meatball big enough to blot out the sun. You probably shouldn’t, but the math checks out.
Tasty little appetizer here… (sydeen/depositphotos)
And like fast food chains in small rural towns, the overwhelming presence of insects has warped the ecosystem around them. Scientists now believe mammals didn’t evolve to eat ants because they wanted to. They evolved because they had to. If you’re a rodent on a budget and your only neighbor is a 3,000,000-member termite HOA, you either expand your food horizons or you die. The good news is, hunger is the best sauce.
These independently evolved anteater variants appeared all over the world. Pangolins, aardvarks, numbats, and that one weird animal Australia refuses to acknowledge have all developed the same set of features: long snoots, sticky tongues, and the overall vibe of a rejected Muppet with boundary issues. This is what’s known as “convergent evolution,” which is biologist-speak for “we keep ordering the same pizza by accident.”
But unlike crabs, who evolved five separate times but took 200 million years to decide they wanted to be sideways tank bugs, anteater variants cranked out their various looks over just 66 million years. That’s almost as fast as humanity went from rotary phones to smart fridges that judge your cheese. In a geological timekeeping sense, anyhow. Look, not every weird metaphor makes sense, just go with it.
Only one group of mammals ever managed to quit the ant life: short-eared elephant shrews. These trailblazing rodents looked deep into their evolutionary soul, dropped their snouts like bad habits, and flipped to a diet of seeds and self-respect. Scientists are still studying them to figure out why they’re the only ones not showing up to the annual AnteaterCon dressed like tongue-wielding weirdos
Nothing weird about this. Nope. (james davis/wikimedia)
Meanwhile, the rest of mammalian life is all-in. Evolution just can’t quit anteaters. And ants just can’t quit being the unkillable underground menace that fuels it all. Termite colonies grew bigger, ants got meaner, and mammals responded by evolving into elongated Roombas with better aim. Twelve times. It’s a perpetual arms race of tiny insect butts versus medium-sized mammal snouts.
It’s only a matter of time before evolution gets bored again and tosses out another anteater build. Maybe your next pet ferret will grow a sticky tongue and start licking your patio for snacks. Maybe your neighbor will. Maybe your neighbor already does. Nature doesn’t give a f**k. The only thing nature loves more than ants is evolving new creatures to eat them.
So remember: If you ever find yourself eating ants out of a log with your tongue, don’t panic. You’re not weird. You’re just on trend. Well actually, you are also weird but who am I to judge? Because when the ants inherit the Earth, the only mammals left standing will be the ones who can lick their way out. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
