Making Way for the Giant Anteaters of Brazil

Had Charles Dickens ever written a novel about Brazilian wildlife, he might have invented a protagonist like Jane, a three-year-old giant anteater whose short life has been rife with misfortune. Before she was born, one brother was likely killed by a puma, another by a car. Jane herself—endowed, like all of her kind, with a toothless tubular snout and resplendently bushy tail—came into the world not in a forest but on a ranch in western Brazil, the sort of environment where anteaters face human-related threats such as dog attacks and exposure to pesticides. When she was one, her mother, too, was run down as she attempted to cross a nearby highway. A year later, the ranch’s owner harvested its eucalyptus trees, robbing Jane of important protection. Jane, now roughly the size of a golden retriever, hunkered down among the logs and eked out a tenuous living, ever endangered by the highway that had left her an orphan and circumscribed her territory.

Giant anteaters spend their days shuffling between anthills and termite mounds, lapping up insects with a sticky, two-foot-long tongue. In Brazil, the country with the world’s fourth largest road network, that means they sometimes cross highways. Such a peripatetic lifestyle has become dangerous in Jane’s rapidly changing home ecosystem, the Cerrado, a rich but underappreciated tropical savanna that’s being transformed by an agricultural boom. From 2019 to 2023, around 12,800 square miles of Cerrado habitat were replaced by soy, corn, eucalyptus, and other commodity crops. The encroaching development has also brought more highway construction and truck traffic, resulting in a disastrous spike in anteater collisions. (The animals’ slow gaits, dark bodies, and nocturnal habits make them especially susceptible.) Arnaud Desbiez, a biologist and National Geographic Explorer who founded the Giant Anteater Conservation Program, the research effort that has tracked Jane and many other anteaters, calls roadkill “the biggest threat to giant anteater survival in Brazil.”

Even a few years ago, the decline of Brazil’s anteaters, and perhaps the eventual extinction of some populations, seemed an intractable problem. But Desbiez and his collaborators have recently made headway by reframing anteater roadkill as a risk to drivers as well. Giant anteaters can tip the scales at more than a hundred pounds, over five times larger than any other anteater species, meaning that motorists are often injured and sometimes even killed when they crash into the hefty beasts. Helping anteaters and other large mammals cross roads, Desbiez argues, is thus a matter of public safety—logic that’s begun to persuade Brazilian road agencies to address the crisis by redesigning highways at a scale never before seen in Latin America. “Our mission is to make roads safe for all,” Desbiez says. “This is not [only] about saving anteaters; this is about saving human lives and biodiversity.”

Like their fellow oddballs sloths and armadillos, giant anteaters are xenarthrans, members of a superorder of mammals that arose in South America shortly after the fall of the dinosaurs. Capable of living roughly 15 years in the wild, the animals play an important role in their ecosystem by controlling insect populations. Giant anteaters can slurp up around 30,000 insects over the course of a day. Females are devoted to their young and will gestate a single baby for six months, which may then ride like a backpack atop its mother for an additional six months.

While Desbiez’s first passion is actually giant armadillos, in the mid-2010s he began to notice that it was anteaters, not rare and furtive ’dillos, whose carcasses littered Brazilian roadsides, and in 2017 he launched a formal investigation of the issue. Over three years, he and a small army of patrollers drove more than 50,000 miles—enough to circle the Earth twice—on four Brazilian roads, counting every dead creature they saw. Ultimately, his crew tallied more than 12,000 road-killed animals, among them caimans, capybaras, crab-eating foxes, and 766 giant anteaters. And that alarming figure likely underestimates the true toll. Their research suggests that scavengers drag away roughly a quarter of anteater carcasses and that more than half of all car-struck anteaters may stagger far from the shoulder to die, eluding surveyors.

Yet Desbiez’s team didn’t just document a catastrophe. They glimpsed solutions. In addition to tallying roadkill, the group collared live anteaters with tracking devices and trailed them across the Cerrado. (Each collared anteater was named for one of the project’s collaborators or supporters; Jane got her moniker in honor of a beloved veterinarian.) Although tagged anteaters often wandered blithely over the pavement, they also on rare occasions followed forested stream banks to bridges and cattle passages, which they then used to safely stroll beneath highways, appearing on camera traps that Desbiez placed within these de facto underpasses. If highway authorities installed more passageways, he realized, with fences on either side to guide anteaters to their entrances, it might be enough to forestall the species’ collapse.

Such animal-friendly infrastructure is hardly a novel concept. Wildlife crossings and roadside fences have helped imperiled animals from panthers in Florida to pangolins in Singapore, and ample research suggests that they dramatically reduce roadkill and reconnect fractured habitats. In the southeastern state of São Paulo, many highways are outfitted with underpasses for tapirs, pumas, capybaras, and other animals, and an overpass allows golden lion tamarins to frolic over four lanes of dense traffic in the country’s Atlantic coastal forest. Yet when Desbiez’s team first approached government highway authorities in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul about anteater crossings, they found little appetite for spending millions of Brazilian reais on underpasses and fencing. “We had some major disagreements,” Desbiez acknowledges.

The anteater conservation program, which operates under the umbrella of the Brazil-based Wild Animal Conservation Institute, broke through by emphasizing human safety, a subject close to the heart of every transportation planner. In the United States, where the average deer collision costs society more than $8,000 in hospital bills, vehicle repairs, and other expenses, research suggests that many wildlife crossings are shrewd investments. A network of overpasses, underpasses, and fences along a mule deer and pronghorn migration corridor in Wyoming, for instance, prevented so many crashes that it should recoup its own costs in under two decades.

The same logic holds in Brazil, where around 20 motorists die annually in collisions with anteaters, tapirs, and other animals in São Paulo alone. Desbiez and his colleagues calculated that fences along anteater roadkill hot spots in Mato Grosso do Sul would pay for themselves within 10 years. The anteater conservation program even studiously changed the language it used to describe the problem, from “roadkill” to “collisions,” a word that better connotes the danger to human life and property.

Armed with these arguments, Desbiez and his collaborators have had more success—particularly on BR-262, a major two-lane highway that crosses the Cerrado and the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland. Crushed animals are so ubiquitous on the notorious road that it’s been dubbed the highway of death, yet this high-speed thoroughfare is rapidly becoming safer. In 2025, the Brazilian Department of Transport Infrastructure and private contractors began retrofitting BR-262 for the sake of wildlife, an initiative that includes more than 100 miles of fencing at roadkill hot spots, 10 new wildlife underpasses, and the modification of dozens of existing bridges and culverts to make them more appealing to animals. Seven new rope bridges will reconnect the forest canopy for howler monkeys and other primates. “With this project, we raise the bar for all sorts of highways in Brazil,” says Fernanda Abra, a road ecologist and National Geographic Explorer who founded ViaFauna, the company that designed the highway of death’s makeover. Abra hopes the plan will motivate other Latin American countries, such as Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, which have lately begun building crossings of their own. “Brazil can be an inspiration for other countries here in Latin America,” she says.

Wildlife crossings and fences alone, for all their virtues, won’t save giant anteaters. They can’t prevent industrial agriculture from overrunning the Cerrado, nor protect wild animals from other threats, like dogs and fires. And some dangerous roads will inevitably remain unredressed. In December 2023, a female anteater was found dead on one of the many unfenced municipal roads in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais—a tragedy compounded by the helpless young pup clinging to her dead mother’s fur. The pup, close to death herself, was transferred to CETAS-Belo Horizonte, one center within Brazil’s growing network of wildlife rehabilitation facilities equipped to care for anteaters, where she was named Cali and fell under the care of Érika Procópio, a veterinarian and rehabber. Cali’s prospects weren’t bright: Her immune system weakened from stress, she developed a fungal infection and lost hair. Improbably, though, Cali hung on, accepting a special cocktail of vitamins, medications, and a blend of goat’s milk and pet kibble—yes, really—formulated by veterinarians. Eventually, she graduated into an open-air paddock and then the wild, where Procópio and her colleagues expect her to thrive and reproduce. “We have very high expectations,” Procópio says.

Jane, the tough young female orphaned by a car, has also flourished amid difficult circumstances. In November 2025, she fled her clear-cut eucalyptus grove and, in the dark of night, ventured onto the same highway that had claimed her mother’s life. Jane survived the crossing and began to walk northeast in search of a vacant territory in which to someday raise pups of her own. As of this spring, she’d covered nearly 20 miles—no small accomplishment in a road-choked world.