10 Animals With Surprisingly Long Tongues

Humans mostly use their tongue for tasting the flavour of foods and speaking. But when it comes to the animals, tongues become tools for hunting, grooming and surviving and so on. There are animals like chameleons that have tongues longer than their own bodies, used for specific feeding habits or habitats. This article brings the names of ten fascinating animals and the fascinating tongue stories that will surprise you.


They are the fastest catcher of their prey like lightning by using their tongue. They can shoot their tongue at speeds over 13 miles per hour and can stretch it twice the length of their body. They survive by eating insects.


This long creature with a long neck and legs also has a long tongue. Length 45-50 centimetres or 18-20 inches. Their tongue is dark in colour to resist sunburn. They are skilled to pluck leaves of treess while avoiding thorns.

They are the giant anteater with a tongue length up to 60 centimetres or 2 feet. The interesting part is, they can flick in and out their tongue 150 times per minute. While they hunt ants their tongue is coated with sticky saliva to collect 30,000 ants or termites a day.


Blue Whales have the largest tongue in the animal kingdom whose weight is around 2700 kg. It is big enough that even 50 people can easily stand on it.

This is called by multiple names, forest giraffe or zebra giraffe are a few common among them. It can lick its own eyes and ears pitty easily. The tongue helps them to clean their fur and ear leaves from tall trees.

They wrap their tongue around their skull for shock absorption. Their tongue is longer than their beak about 10 centimetres. They use it to extract insects from deep inside the tree bark.

These animals are also ant eating specialists. Their tongue can stretch up to 40 centimetres which is even longer than their body when extended.


They are the sticky hunter with a tongue length of nearly 1.5 times their body which flips out in less than 0.07 seconds. Their tongue is also coated with a special sticky mucus.

They love honey, so they climb mountains to hunt honey. Their length of tongue is around 20-25 centimetres. They use it to extract honey from beehives and insects from crevices. People kept their nickname as the Honey Bear.


Snakes use their tongue to sense chemical cues in the air which is the reason you may have witnessed them constantly flicking their tongue out, to smell the surroundings. Which is really essential for them to hunt and navigate.

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