When Fundación Rewilding Argentina launched its giant anteater recovery project in 2007, the Iberá Wetlands of Corrientes province had been entirely emptied of the species. Poaching, wildfires, and decades of habitat degradation had wiped out the yurumí — as giant anteaters are known locally — by the mid-twentieth century. Not a single individual remained in the wild.
Today, nineteen years later, approximately 200 giant anteaters roam free across Iberá. It is one of the most successful mammal rewilding programs in South American history, and a story that is redefining what conservation recovery can look like.
The Long Road Back
The path began with an ambitious goal and a near-empty landscape. Over the operational phase of the project, the foundation's team worked systematically to rescue, rehabilitate, and release giant anteaters from across Argentina — animals that had been orphaned, injured, or found wandering too close to roads and farms.
In total, 110 individuals were brought into the program. Each was assessed, rehabilitated, and gradually introduced to the vast wetland system — one of the largest freshwater ecosystems in South America — before being released into carefully monitored zones. The process was methodical and slow by design: giant anteaters are solitary and territorial, and the team needed to ensure each animal could establish a home range without competing with others already settled in the landscape.
What happened next exceeded expectations. The released animals began to breed successfully, and their offspring — born wild in Iberá — grew up knowing nothing but the wetland. Those animals, in turn, had offspring of their own. The population compounded.
A Population Built From Scratch
The Iberá anteater population now stands at roughly 200 individuals across multiple generations. The youngest animals have never been near captivity. They dig through termite mounds and ant colonies, travel enormous distances through the savannah mosaic, and behave in every measurable way like the wild anteaters their ancestors were before the species disappeared from Corrientes entirely.
"These are not animals we need to manage intensively anymore," the Fundación Rewilding Argentina team noted. "They are functioning as wild anteaters should."
That self-sustaining character is the defining measure of success for any rewilding program. Many efforts stall after the initial release phase, with animals failing to reproduce or establish stable social structures in new environments. Iberá has now produced multiple generations of wild-born individuals — the critical threshold that separates a managed population from a genuinely recovered one.
A Blueprint for the World
The Iberá anteater program is already informing how Fundación Rewilding Argentina approaches other restoration projects in the region, including the reintroduction of jaguars, tapirs, pampas deer, and other species to ecosystems they once inhabited.
Giant anteaters are classified as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with road mortality, wildfires, and habitat fragmentation driving declines across their Central and South American range. In Brazil alone, road kills account for thousands of anteater deaths each year.
Corrientes province has transformed its relationship with the species. What was once a landscape in which the yurumí had disappeared entirely is now a place where anteaters are visible to ecotourists, studied by researchers, and celebrated by local communities as a symbol of Iberá's extraordinary ecological richness.
The return of 200 giant anteaters to Iberá is not just a number — it is a proof of concept. It demonstrates that large mammal rewilding is achievable, that local communities can become partners in recovery, and that the loss of a species is not necessarily permanent.
In a world where conservation headlines are often dominated by decline and extinction, Iberá's anteaters are a genuine counterexample: a growing, thriving wild population generating new generations of animals that have never needed human help to survive. That is the kind of story the planet needs more of.
