Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Placentophagy: eating placenta; Trophallaxis: eating food regurgitated by another animal; Zoopharmacognosy: self-medication by eating plants, soils, and insects to treat and prevent disease. An opportunistic feeder sustains itself from a number of different food sources, because the species is behaviourally sufficiently flexible.
Juvenile Iberian green woodpecker eating ants. Myrmecophagy is found in several land-dwelling vertebrate taxa, including reptiles and amphibians (horned lizards and blind snakes, narrow-mouthed toads of the family Microhylidae and poison frogs of the Dendrobatidae), some New World bird species (Antbirds, Antthrushes, Antpittas, flicker of genus Colaptes), and mammalian groups including ...
Eighty percent of the world's nations eat insects of 1,000 to 2,000 species. [10] [11] FAO has registered some 1,900 edible insect species and estimates that there were, in 2005, some two billion insect consumers worldwide. FAO suggests eating insects as a possible solution to environmental degradation caused by livestock production. [12]
The smallest amphibian (and vertebrate) in the world is a frog from New Guinea (Paedophryne amauensis) with a length of just 7.7 mm (0.30 in). The largest living amphibian is the 1.8 m (5 ft 11 in) South China giant salamander ( Andrias sligoi ), but this is dwarfed by prehistoric temnospondyls such as Mastodonsaurus which could reach up to 6 m ...
The world’s frogs, salamanders, newts and other amphibians remain in serious trouble. A new global assessment has found that 41% of amphibian species that scientists have studied are threatened ...
Herbivory is of extreme ecological importance and prevalence among insects.Perhaps one third (or 500,000) of all described species are herbivores. [4] Herbivorous insects are by far the most important animal pollinators, and constitute significant prey items for predatory animals, as well as acting as major parasites and predators of plants; parasitic species often induce the formation of galls.
Frogs are extremely efficient at converting what they eat into body mass. They are an important food source for predators and part of the food web dynamics of many of the world's ecosystems. The skin is semi-permeable, making them susceptible to dehydration, so they either live in moist places or have special adaptations to deal with dry habitats.
The crop (also the croup, the craw, the ingluvies, and the sublingual pouch) is a thin-walled, expanded portion of the alimentary tract, which is used for the storage of food before digestion. The crop is an anatomical structure in vertebrate animals, such as birds , and invertebrate animals, such as gastropods (snails and slugs), earthworms ...