The giant anteater's skull is a long fused tube with no teeth and jaws that cannot chew. Feeding relies instead on a tongue about 60 centimetres long, anchored to the sternum, coated in sticky saliva and flicked in and out at high speed. The animal breaks into a nest, harvests for under a minute, and moves on before the defenders overwhelm it.
Digestion happens further down. The stomach has a hardened, muscular pyloric region that contracts to crush the swallowed insects, assisted by ingested sand and soil. This is the same solution birds reach with a gizzard, arrived at independently.
The animal's foraging arithmetic is often exaggerated. Estimates of tens of thousands of insects consumed daily come from scaling short observation bouts and should be read as approximations, not counts. The genuinely open question is how much a giant anteater's brief, repeated raids shape ant and termite colony survival across a landscape, since colonies are rarely destroyed outright.