Examples of Carnivores Plants and Animals

You may have heard the terms carnivore and herbivore before. But what is a carnivore, and how can you tell if you’re looking at one? Keep reading for helpful definitions of different eating behaviors and examples of carnivores.

What Is a Carnivore?

A carnivore is an organism that mostly eats meat, or the flesh of animals. Sometimes carnivores are called predators. Organisms that carnivores hunt are called prey.

Carnivores are a major part of the food web; a description of which organisms eat which other organisms in the wild.

A carnivore is an animal that gets food from killing and eating other animals.

Carnivores generally eat herbivores, but can eat omnivores, and occasionally other carnivores. Animals that eat other animals, like carnivores and omnivores are important to any ecosystem, because they keep other species from getting overpopulated.

Since carnivores have to hunt down and kill other animals, they require a large amount of calories. This means that they have to eat many other animals over the course of the year. The bigger the carnivore, the more it has to eat. You should make sure that you have many more herbivores and omnivores than carnivores.

Examples of Carnivores Animals:

• Lion
• Wolf
• Leopard
• Hyena
• Polar Bear
• Cheetah
• Giant Panda
• Felidae
• Tigers
• Sharks
• Venus Fly Traps

Characteristics of Carnivorous Animals

The characteristics of carnivorous animals are:

• Carnivorous animals have specialized dentition to hunt and kill prey. For example, baleen whales are considered predators as they hunt krill using their baleen plates as filter-feeding systems. Similarly, most carnivorous mammals use sharp canines to deliver the killing blow. Venomous reptiles use fangs that function like hypodermic needles to inject venom into their prey.
• Some carnivorous animals such as chameleons and a few species of frogs have long sticky tongues to catch prey.
• Most carnivores are usually fast as they need to chase and tire their prey.
• Some arthropods such as spiders use venom to kill their prey.
• Carnivores do not have the ability to detoxify vitamin A in the liver.
• The length of the intestine in carnivorous animals is small.

Types Of Carnivores

There are three different types of carnivores, and each type has diets that consist of varying levels of meat consumption.

Obligate carnivores

Obligate carnivores are also called hypercarnivores, which are animals whose diet consists of at least 70 percent meat. Carnivores that eat mostly meat are called obligate carnivores; they cannot properly digest vegetation.

The cat family, including lions, tigers and small cats, for example, are obligate carnivores. Many hypercarnivores, such as some members of the Carnivora order, have heavy skulls with strong facial musculature to aid in holding prey, cutting flesh, or grinding bones.

Many also have a special fourth upper molar and first lower molar. They close together in a shearing action, like scissors, which allows animals to slice meat from their prey.

Hypocarnivores

Hypocarnivores are carnivores that eat the least amount of meat. They consume meat for less than 30 percent of their diet. These animals eat meat, fish, berries, nuts and roots. These animals can also be considered omnivores.

Hypocarnivores have smaller carnassial teeth and larger molars to accommodate their varied diets.

Mesocarnivores

Mesocarnivores are animals that depend on meat for at least 50 percent of their diet. To supplement their diet, these animals will eat fruits, vegetables, and fungi. Mesocarnivores are typically small to mid-size species and often live close to human populations.

Size

The planet’s largest animal is a carnivore. The blue whale can reach 30 meters (100 feet) long and weigh as much as 180 metric tons (200 tons). It feeds by taking huge gulps of water and then filtering out tiny shrimp-like creatures called krill.

The blue whale can eat about 3.6 metric tons (4 tons) of krill every day—that’s about 40 million of the little creatures. The largest land carnivore is the polar bear, which feeds mainly on seals.

Large carnivores include wolves and mountain lions. A large carnivore might hunt down large herbivores such as elk and deer. Medium-sized carnivores include hawks and snakes, and these animals typically feed on rodents, birds, eggs, frogs, and insects.

Examples of small carnivores include some smaller birds and toads. These carnivores may eat insects and worms.

Examples of Carnivorous Animals

Examples of carnivores include land mammals such as the tiger, lion, wolf, wolverine and African wild dog; marine mammals such as seals and the orca; birds such as eagles, owls and shrikes; reptiles such as snakes and crocodiles; and ocean animals such as sharks and squid.

Other Examples of carnivores include:

Examples of Carnivorous Plants

Animals aren’t the only carnivores — there are more than 600 species of carnivorous plants, according to the Botanical Society of America.

These plants get at least some of their nutrients by trapping and digesting insects and sometimes even small frogs and mammals. Because the most common prey for most carnivorous plants are insects, these leafy flesh-eaters are also called insectivorous plants.

While most plants absorb nitrogen from the soil through their roots, carnivorous plants get nitrogen from animal prey that gets trapped in their modified leaves. The traps work in various ways.

A Venus flytrap (Dionea muscipula), for example, has hinged leaves that snap shut when trigger hairs are touched. A pitcher plant has a pitfall trap; its leaves fold into deep pits filled with digestive enzymes. And sundews and butterworts have sticky mucus on their stalks that stops insects in their tracks.

Other Examples of Carnivores Plants:

Largest carnivore on land

The largest terrestrial carnivore is the polar bear (Ursus maritimus). Adult males typically weigh 400–600 kg (880–1,320 lb), and have a nose-to-tail length of 2.4–2.6 m (7 ft 10 in–8 ft 6 in).

The male Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi), a subspecies of brown bear found on Kodiak Island and the adjacent Afognak and Shuyak islands, in the Gulf of Alaska, USA, is usually shorter in length than the polar bear but more robustly built.

The largest carnivore overall is the southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina). Bulls of this species – the largest pinnipeds – have an average length of 5 m (16 ft 4 in) and weigh up to 3,500 kg (7,720 lb).

Technically, both polar bears and elephant seals are “semi-aquatic animals” dividing their time between land and water, so some would argue that the southern elephant seal is the largest carnivore on land.

However, while elephant seals always remain close to the water on the shore, polar bears are capable of surviving hundreds of kilometres inland, and indeed are increasingly being forced to as sea-ice continues to diminish.