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[1] An idiomatic (rather than ecological) definition is preferred here because although, statistically, attacks on humans by wild carnivores are an extremely rare cause of death—even in regions with high levels of human-wildlife interaction and relatively high absolute numbers of attacks [2] —the topic remains one of great fascination [3 ...
In Tibetan Buddhism, the practice of excarnation—that is, the exposure of dead human bodies to carrion birds and/or other scavenging animals—is the distinctive characteristic of sky burial, which involves the dismemberment of human cadavers of whom the remains are fed to vultures, and traditionally the main funerary rite (alongside ...
A man-eating animal or man-eater is an individual animal or being that preys on humans as a pattern of hunting behavior. This does not include the scavenging of corpses, a single attack born of opportunity or desperate hunger, or the incidental eating of a human that the animal has killed in self-defense.
Many invertebrates, such as the carrion and burying beetles, [6] as well as maggots of calliphorid flies (such as one of the most important species in Calliphora vomitoria) and flesh-flies, also eat carrion, playing an important role in recycling nitrogen and carbon in animal remains. [7] Zoarcid fish feeding on the carrion of a mobulid ray.
Carrion insects are insects associated with decomposing remains. The processes of decomposition begin within a few minutes of death. [ 1 ] Decomposing remains offer a temporary, changing site of concentrated resources which are exploited by a wide range of organisms, of which arthropods are often the first to arrive and the predominant ...
Xylophagy is a term used in ecology to describe the habits of an herbivorous animal whose diet consists primarily (often solely) of wood. The word derives from Greek ξυλοφάγος (xulophagos) "eating wood", from ξύλον (xulon) "wood" and φαγεῖν (phagein) "to eat". Animals feeding only on dead wood are called sapro-xylophagous ...
A large amount of detritus is used as a source of nutrition for animals. In particular, many bottom feeding animals living in mud flats feed in this way. In particular, since excreta are materials which other animals do not need, whatever energy value they might have, they are often unbalanced as a source of nutrients, and are not suitable as a ...
A gummivore is an omnivorous animal whose diet consists primarily of the gums and saps of trees (about 90%) and insects for protein. [1] Notable gummivores include arboreal, terrestrial primates like certain marmosets and lemurs. These animals that live off of the injuries of trees live from about 8m off of the ground up to the canopies.