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Since a fertilized egg represents a complete organism at one stage of its life cycle, eating an egg is a form of predation, the killing of another organism for food. Egg predation is found widely across the animal kingdom, including in fish , birds , snakes , mammals , and arthropods .
Crepuscular, a classification of animals that are active primarily during twilight, making them similar to nocturnal animals. Diurnality, plant or animal behavior characterized by activity during the day and sleeping at night. Cathemeral, a classification of organisms with sporadic and random intervals of activity during the day or night.
Some crepuscular animals may also be active by moonlight or during an overcast day. Matutinal animals are active only after dawn, and vespertine only before dusk. A number of factors affect the time of day an animal is active. Predators hunt when their prey is available, and prey try to avoid the times when their principal predators are at large.
Sleep can follow a physiological or behavioral definition. In the physiological sense, sleep is a state characterized by reversible unconsciousness, special brainwave patterns, sporadic eye movement, loss of muscle tone (possibly with some exceptions; see below regarding the sleep of birds and of aquatic mammals), and a compensatory increase following deprivation of the state, this last known ...
The kiwi is a family of nocturnal birds endemic to New Zealand.. While it is difficult to say which came first, nocturnality or diurnality, a hypothesis in evolutionary biology, the nocturnal bottleneck theory, postulates that in the Mesozoic, many ancestors of modern-day mammals evolved nocturnal characteristics in order to avoid contact with the numerous diurnal predators. [3]
Monotremes are typified by structural differences in their brains, jaws, digestive tract, reproductive tract, and other body parts, compared to the more common mammalian types. Although they are different from almost all mammals in that they lay eggs, like all mammals, the female monotremes nurse their young with milk.
The hippopotamus sleeps with both hemispheres of the brain resting, as in all land mammals, and usually sleeps on land or in water with the nostrils exposed. Despite this, it may be capable of sleeping while submerged, intermittently surfacing to breathe without waking.
Desert Spider, Stegodyphus lineatus, one of the best-described species that participates in matriphagy Matriphagy is the consumption of the mother by her offspring. [1] [2] The behavior generally takes place within the first few weeks of life and has been documented in some species of insects, nematode worms, pseudoscorpions, and other arachnids as well as in caecilian amphibians.