Examples Of Herbivores Animals

Herbivores are animals that primarily feed on plants. For example, cows are herbivores, have you seen them hunting other animals? These animals have adapted to a diet of mostly plants and have specialized digestive systems that allow them to extract energy and nutrients from them efficiently.

Examples of herbivorous animals include deer, rabbits, cows, horses, elephants, and gorillas. These animals help to maintain the balance of plant growth in their ecosystem. In this article, we discuss common examples of herbivore animals.

What Are Herbivores?

An herbivore is an animal that mainly eats plants. Herbivores vary in size from small, like bugs, to large, like giraffes.

An animal’s diet determines where it falls on the food chain, a sequence of organisms that provide energy and nutrients for other organisms. Each food chain consists of several trophic levels, which describe an organism’s role in energy transfer in an ecosystem. Herbivores are primary consumers, which means they occupy the second trophic level and eat producers.

Many herbivores spend a large part of their life eating. Elephants need to eat about 130 kilograms (300 pounds) of food a day. It takes a long time to eat that many leaves and grass, so elephants sometimes eat for 18 hours a day.

Herbivores depend on plants for their survival. If the plant population declines, herbivores cannot get enough food. Beavers, for example, feed on trees and plants that live near water. If the trees are removed to build houses and roads, the beaver population cannot survive.

Key Takeaways:

Herbivores are animals that have adapted to eat plants and other autotrophs – organisms that can produce their own food, such as through light, water, or chemicals like carbon dioxide.
The feeding relationships between herbivores can be described by food chains, or food chains linked together into a more complex food web.
There are many types of herbivorous animals. Herbivores can be further grouped into different classifications depending on the food they primarily eat for their diet.
Herbivores have evolved many features that will allow them to eat plants, including wide and flat teeth and specialized digestive systems.

What Do Herbivores Eat?

Some herbivores eat any plant matter they can find. Elephants, for example, eat bark, leaves, small branches, roots, grasses, and fruit. Black rhinoceroses also eat a variety of fruits, branches, and leaves.

Other herbivores eat only one part of a plant. An animal that specializes in eating fruit is called a frugivore. Oilbirds, which live in northern South America, are frugivores. They eat nothing but the fruit of palms and laurels.

Granivores eat seeds in a number of ways. Some bugs suck out the insides of seeds, and some rodents use their front teeth to gnaw at seeds. Granivores can eat seeds before they have been dispersed by the plant into the world, afterward, or seek both kinds.

Grazers like cows and horses feed mainly on grasses. They have a rumen, or first stomach, which holds a large amount of food and causes food to leave the stomach slowly. This process is necessary for grass, which is high in fiber and low in nutrients. The mouths of grazers allow them to easily eat large portions of grass but make it difficult for them to eat certain parts of a plant.

Browsers like giraffes eat leaves, fruits, twigs, and flowers of woody plants. Their rumens are smaller and thus hold less food than grazers’. Browsers also eat a lot of easily digestible food.

The koala, which is native to Australia, eats little besides the leaves of eucalyptus trees. An animal that eats the leaves and shoots of trees is called a folivore. Pandas, which feed almost exclusively on bamboo, are folivores. Termites are insects that feed mostly on wood. Wood-eaters are called xylophages.

Many insects are herbivores. Some, such as grasshoppers, will eat every part of a plant. Others specialize in certain parts of the plant. Aphids drink the sap, a sticky fluid that carries nutrients through the plant. Caterpillars eat leaves.

The larvae, or young wormlike forms, of root weevils, feed on roots. Asian long-horned beetles tunnel deep into the heart of a tree and eat the wood there. Honeybees feed on nectar and pollen from flowers.