Facts about Aardvark Feeding Habits
- 06
Primarily nocturnal in their feeding behavior, aardvarks forage alone at night and can travel several miles in a single outing searching for food.
- 05
Specialized peg-like teeth located at the back of an aardvark's jaw are used to grind insects, as they lack front incisors entirely.
- 04
During feeding, aardvarks use their powerful claws to tear open hardened termite mounds that would otherwise resist most predators.
- 03
The aardvark's elongated snout contains a highly developed sense of smell, which it relies on to locate buried insect colonies in the dark.
- 02
A single aardvark can consume tens of thousands of insects in one night, making it an important natural control of termite and ant populations.
- 01
Aardvarks feed almost exclusively on ants and termites, using their long sticky tongue to extract prey from underground colonies.