Based on food habits animals can be classified into different groups like omnivores, carnivores and herbivores, animals who prefer vegetation as their food are known as herbivores, animals who prefer to eat other animals are known as carnivores while the animals who takes all types of food are known as omnivores but now we will only focus on carnivores and herbivores we will not talk about omnivores here.
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Carnivores or Carnivorous Animals:
This group of animals are highly dependent on other animals for their food because they do not prefer vegetarian food they only take non vegetarian food and they show different adaptations for catching different animals and taking them as food.
In carnivores different adaptations are seen for eating other animals and one of them is a very strong muscular jaw which helps them to crush the bone and tear the flesh but their jaws show only up and down movement but they are not able to move their jaw laterally.
Carnivores do not only meat some carnivores only take little amount of meat of their total diet as seen in black bears who takes only 30-50% meat and they are known as hypocarnivores and their digestive system is very simple and all the carnivore evolved from a single ancestor during the time of evolution.
Classification of Carnivores On the Basis of Food Habits:
We can classify different carnivorous animals on the basis of their food habits because all carnivores do not prefer to take all animals as food, for example vermivore feed on worm, insectivores feed on insects, avio vore feed on birds, piscivore feed on fish, ovivore feed on eggs while hematophage feed on animals blood.
Classification of Carnivores On the Basis of Their Diet Composition:
How much amount of meat a carnivorous animals take as food as compared to their total food is different in different animals and depending upon this proportion we can classify them into three groups – hypercarnivores who takes more 70% of their food as meat as seen in case of shark, mesocarnivores who takes 30-50% of their food as meat as seen in fox and dogs while hypercarnivores are those animals who takes less than 30% meat of their diet as seen in black bears.
Classification of Carnivores On the Basis of Food Acquisition:
All carnivores do not catch the prey and hunt them some carnivores do not hunt, they only enjoy the dead animals and depending upon the way they collect their food make them into two groups, predators who catch animals and hunt them to take them as food as we see in different member of cat family lions, tigers while some carnivores take food from dead animals body as in the case of vulture and eagles who are known as scavenger.
Examples of Carnivores:
Now we will take some names of important carnivores – carnivores mammals like tigers, lions, different carnivorous birds like vulture, eagles, kite, different carnivorous reptiles like crocodiles, snakes, alligator, some dragon, carnivores aquatic animals like whale, shark.
Herbivores or Herbivorous Animals:
The animal who directly depends on plant for their food are known as herbivores and other animals depends on them are known as carnivores, for example cattle animals like cow, buffalo, goat, sheep, some birds, some dinosaur species was also herbivores, different wild herbivores like deer, giraffes, zebra, horses, rodents like rabbits, squirrel prefer to eat vegetarian food.
Depending upon which part of the plant they take as food the herbivores are classified into different groups like the herbivores who take fruit as food are known as frugivores while some herbivores eat leafy green soft part of plant known as folivores.
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