In this world, there is a living thing to eat pretty much everything! Some animals specialise in eating other animals, some specialise in eating plants. Many living things specialise in making their own food by chemical reactions (like plants making sugars via photosynthesis). What is waste (i.e. poo) to one animal, is food to another living thing. When an animal dies, something will eat it, and the waste those things make will go to help the plants grow…we can make ‘food webs’, to describe how nutrients and energy are transfered through different species, so that we can understand how interconnected everything is.
We can usually divide animals’ diets into four main categories, such as:
– herbivore (an animal who eats mainly plants) – cows, rabbits, elephants, giraffes;
– carnivore (meat-eaters, animals who eat other animals) – lions, sharks, crocodiles, wolves;
– scavanger (an animal who eats dead animals) – vultures, hienas, small invertebrates that live in the soil;
– omnivores (animals who eat pretty much anything) – bears, lemurs, some birds and humans!
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