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It was once thought that attending birds were actually eating the ants, but numerous studies in various parts of Eciton burchellii's range has shown that the ants act as beaters, flushing insects, other arthropods and small vertebrates into the waiting flocks of "ant followers".
A black drongo in a typical anting posture. Anting is a maintenance behavior during which birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin.The bird may pick up the insects in its bill and rub them on the body (active anting), or the bird may lie in an area of high density of the insects and perform dust bathing-like movements (passive anting).
The bicoloured antbird is an obligate ant-follower.. Ant followers are birds that feed by following swarms of army ants and take prey flushed by those ants. [1] The best-known ant-followers are 18 species of antbird in the family Thamnophilidae, but other families of birds may follow ants, including thrushes, chats, ant-tanagers, cuckoos, motmots, and woodcreepers.
The ant-eating chat or southern anteater-chat (Myrmecocichla formicivora) is a species of bird in the family Muscicapidae. It is found in Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical dry shrubland and subtropical or tropical dry lowland grassland.
Birds that follow ants eat many prey insects and thus decrease the foraging success of ants. [201] Birds indulge in a peculiar behaviour called anting that, as yet, is not fully understood. Here birds rest on ant nests, or pick and drop ants onto their wings and feathers; this may be a means to remove ectoparasites from the birds.
Juvenile Iberian green woodpecker eating ants. Myrmecophagy is found in several land-dwelling vertebrate taxa, including reptiles and amphibians (horned lizards and blind snakes, narrow-mouthed toads of the family Microhylidae and poison frogs of the Dendrobatidae), some New World bird species (Antbirds, Antthrushes, Antpittas, flicker of genus Colaptes), and mammalian groups including ...
[12] [13] [15] Giant anteaters have the largest degree of rostral elongation relative to their size of any other ant-eating mammal. [16] The tamanduas are medium-sized species smaller than the giant anteater, with a total body length of around 0.77–1.33 m (2.5–4.4 ft) and a mass of 3.2–7.0 kg (7.1–15.4 lb).
These are forest birds that tend to feed at or near the ground since many are specialist ant eaters. Most are drab in appearance with shades of (rusty) brown, black, and white being their dominant tones. Compared to other birds that specialize in following ants, this family is the most tied to the ground.