20 Feeding Time The Feeding Habits of Animals

CHAPTER 1 Eat to Live EVERY LIVING THING NEEDS FOOD. WHAT DOES THE BODY DO WITH FOOD? WHAT DOES FOOD DO FOR THE BODY? All animals need to eat food. The food gives them energy to run, fly, live, and grow. But how much do different animals eat? Some animals need to eat more than others. Most birds need a lot of food. They eat from half to all of their weight in a day. For example, a bird that weighs two kilograms eats one to two kilograms of food. Scientists watched one bird bring food back to her babies 1,200 times in one day! Koalas weigh 5—14 kilograms. They are not large animals, but for how much they weigh, they don't eat very much. They only eat about 1.3 kilograms of leaves from the eucalyptus tree a day. The leaves don't have many nutrients. Koalas sleep 16 to 18 hours a day because the leaves don't give them much energy. Bears often sleep all the time in the winter. Before the bears go to sleep, they must eat a lot of food. They can eat 40 kilograms of food in the week before they go to sleep. They need to get very fat because they can't eat when they are sleeping! When they sleep, the fat becomes energy. Without this energy, the bears can't live through the winter. And some big animals eat a lot all year. At night, a hippopotamus leaves the river where it sleeps most of the day. It eats plants and grasses for about five hours. It eats about 40 kilograms of food a night.

CHAPTER 2 The Mouth THE MOUTHS OF ANIMALS ARE VERY INTERESTING. DO YOU WANT TO LOOK INSIDE? Sucker fish get their name from their mouths. They use their mouths to suck food into their bodies. People with pet fish sometimes use sucker fish to clean the water for their fish. The sucker fish sucks and eats the very small things in the water to make it clean. The mouth of a bird is called a beak. One kind of hummingbird has a beak that is longer than its body! The hummingbird's beak goes down into flowers to drink the juice. Inside the beak is a long, slim tongue that gets the juice out of the flower. The chameleon's tongue is longer than its body. The chameleon moves its long tongue quickly out of its mouth to catch insects. The tongue then brings the insects into the chameleon's mouth. The tongue of the blue whale is so big that 50 people can stand on it! Whales eat a lot. The blue whale eats more than 3,000 kilograms of fish every day. First, it takes a big drink of water and catches a lot of fish in its mouth. Then its big tongue pushes the water out through little spaces under its mouth. The fish can't get out. Then the whale eats all the fish.

Many sharks have 40 to 90 teeth. The whale shark, however, has thousands of teeth. Sharks' teeth are dangerous. They're long and sharp like knives. They use their teeth to kill fish and other animals. When a shark loses a tooth, a new tooth grows in the space. A shark can have more than 30,000 teeth in its life! Snakes use their teeth to catch animals, but they don't use their teeth to eat. First, the snake opens its mouth, so it's very big. Then the snake swallows all of the animal without chewing! A snake can eat animals that are much bigger than it is! Saliva makes it easier for animals to swallow their food. But it also helps some animals catch their food. The Gila monster and the Komodo dragon are lizards. They both have saliva with poison in it. After a Gila monster or Komodo dragon bites an animal, the poison makes the animal sick. Soon, it stops moving, and the lizard can eat it. The Gila monster eats eggs, insects, smaller lizards, and other small animals. The Komodo dragon can kill and eat very big animals, even pigs, horses, or people!

CHAPTER 3 The Stomach FOOD CHANGES INTO ENERGY IN THE STOMACH. DO YOU KNOW WHY ANIMALS HAVE DIFFERENT KINDS OF STOMACHS? After an animal chews and swallows, the food travels to the stomach. The stomach does most of the work of digesting the food. A liquid comes out of the walls of the stomach. This liquid has important things in it that take nutrients out of the food. These nutrients give the body energy. Most animals have stomachs. Some animals have stomachs with several parts. And other animals have no stomach! The cow's stomach is different from ours. It has four parts. Why is this? Well, a cow eats a lot of grass quickly. First, the cow swallows the grass but does not chew it very much. This food goes into the first part of the stomach. Later, parts of this food, called the cud, go back up to the mouth of the cow. The cow chews the cud and swallows it down again. The cud can go up and down 40 to 60 times! Then, the other parts of the stomach digest the cud.

A seahorse is a beautiful little animal that lives in the deep waters of the ocean. Seahorses have no stomach at all! They also have no teeth. Seahorses eat very small fish. They suck and swallow the fish without chewing. How much time does the stomach of an animal need to digest its food? Some animals need a lot of time because of the kind of food they eat. For example, a dog eats a lot of meat. The stomach of a dog needs to work a lot to digest this kind of food. A dog's stomach needs about eight hours to digest meat. But birds that eat fruit are different. These birds only need 30—60 minutes to digest fruit. And what about seahorses? They suck in water with fish into their mouths. They have no stomach, so the food goes out again very quickly. They need to eat all the time!

CHAPTER 4 Waste HOW CAN SOMETHING SO BAD BE SO GOOD? An animal's body takes some nutrients out of food. The rest is waste. Animal waste is dirty, and it must leave the body so the animal does not get sick. But animal waste has other nutrients in it. These nutrients are good for the soil. Farmers use dung the waste from animals that eat grass— to help grow plants. People also use animal waste, dead plants, and old food to make compost. Compost is like dung—full of nutrients for the soil. People use compost in their gardens to make the soil better. It helps them grow vegetables, plants, and flowers. The waste of zoo animals is also very good for the soil. Today, zoos sell waste to farmers and gardeners. For example, Zoo Miami in Florida, USA, gets 635 kilograms of waste from elephants, 340 kilograms from rhinoceroses, and 226 kilograms from giraffes every day! These animals also eat grass, so their dung is good for the soil. Maybe someone you know uses elephant dung to grow their flowers or food!