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Feeding In Animals
By peace | April 28, 2007
Picture of Grizzly bear: Bears eat many food, including fruit, nuts, roots, honey, carrion (dead animals), small mammals, and salmon too.
All animals must eat other organisms to survive. Animals can be divided into two main groups, according to their feeding habits — carnivores (meat-eaters) and herbivores (plant-eaters). Most animals eat either meat or plants, but omnivores eat both. The word omnivore means ‘everything-eater’. Bears, humans and pigs are omnivores. In our diet, we carry on the traditions of our early ancestors, who killed game and also gathered berries and nuts.
Most carnivores are predators — animals that hunt other animals for food. Predators usually have sharp teeth, claws or beaks to tear apart their prey. Animal flesh is nourishing, so predators do not have to kill very often. It is also easy to digest.
A shark’s teeth are sharp and pointed to rip prey to pieces. They grow in rows and are continually shed and replaced. Some species may get through as many as 30000 teeth in a lifetime. Not all sharks are predators — the largest, the whale shark, is a filter-feeder.
Filter-feeding is a feeding method works by sifting large amounts of small organisms from water. It is a bit like using a sieve to catch prey. Filter-feeders come in a variety of shapes and sizes — barnacles, flamingos, and baleen whales (including the blue whale) all feed in this way.
Top predators such as lions, sharks and eagles rely on strength and speed to overcome their victims. Smaller or weaker hunters may rely on stealth or special techniques to capture prey. Some predators, such as wolves, hunt in packs. Spiders spin webs to tangle up victims. Rattlesnakes kill their prey with venom.
Hyenas and vultures are scavengers — meat-eaters that get their food from the abandoned kills of others.
Scavengers are animals that feed on dead or injured animals. Scavengers are not usually held in high esteem, but they have a job to do: they clean the earth of organic garbage.
Some birds, such as toucan, specialize in eating fruit. Toucan’s bill is extra-large for probing through vegetation. Packed with sugars, fruit is much more nourishing than leaves and far easier to digest. However, it is also more scattered and harder to find. Many fruit-eating birds sometimes have to eat insects. It is only in tropical rainforest that birds can find fruit all year round.
The jaws, teeth, and stomachs of herbivores are designed to tackle tough plant food. Compared with meat, plants are not very nourishing, so many herbivores spend long hours feeding.
Plants contain tough cellulose, which is hard to digest. Many herbivores’ stomachs are filled with microbes, which break down cellulose. Some plant-eaters, such as cattle, have stomachs with several chambers. After passing through some chambers, food is returned to the mouth for more chewing to help break it down.
Herbivores do not need quick wits to capture their food, but they must be swift or have some means of defence to avoid being eaten by predators. Many are camouflaged to blend in with their surroundings, so that hunters do not notice them. Others have tough skin, spines or even poison to put off enemies.
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