What did you have to eat today? If you are like most humans, you probably had meat and plants! Humans are omnivores too! Our teeth are designed to eat both meat and plants. Our front teeth help us rip into meat and bite into fruits and vegetables.
Our molars help us grind up meat and chew fruits and vegetables. Many omnivorous animals also have teeth that help them eat both plants and animals. The Bear Facts Black bears , polar bears , and grizzly bears are members of the carnivora order, but they are omnivores.
Most of the black bear's diet consists of plants. They can adjust their diet s. If all the salmon or other animals disappear from a river ecosystem , a big cat living in that habitat could not survive. Cats are carnivores that cannot digest or obtain nutrients from plant material. However, a grizzly bear could still survive eating berries, fruit, roots, and insects.
Because they have an easier time finding food, omnivores are sometimes better at adapting to new environments than creatures with more specific feeding habits.
Omnivores can better adapt to development than herbivores or carnivores. Urban development, the process of clearing land for homes, business, and agriculture , destroys habitats, the places where animals live in the wild. Herbivores such as elephants cannot survive without a lot of trees and grasses to eat. But omnivores such as opossums, seagulls, and many species of monkey easily adapt to life in urban area s and farmland , where they often find meals in garbage cans.
Living Garbage Cans Some animals, such as tiger sharks or goats, have been known to consume a wide variety of objects: aluminum cans, surfboards, clothes and textiles, plastics, and rope. These "living garbage cans" are not considered omnivores, because they gain no nutritional value or energy from these products. Tiger sharks are carnivores that mistake these items for food.
Goats are herbivores that are curious about unique odors or new foods. Female mammals produce milk to feed their offspring. Also called an autotroph. Seaweed can be composed of brown, green, or red algae, as well as "blue-green algae," which is actually bacteria.
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You cannot download interactives. Agricultural communities developed approximately 10, years ago when humans began to domesticate plants and animals. By establishing domesticity, families and larger groups were able to build communities and transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle dependent on foraging and hunting for survival.
Select from these resources to teach your students about agricultural communities. Trophic levels provide a structure for understanding food chains and how energy flows through an ecosystem. At the base of the pyramid are the producers, who use photosynthesis or chemosynthesis to make their own food. Herbivores or primary consumers, make up the second level.
Secondary and tertiary consumers, omnivores and carnivores, follow in the subsequent sections of the pyramid. At each step up the food chain, only 10 percent of the energy is passed on to the next level, while approximately 90 percent of the energy is lost as heat. Teach your students how energy is transferred through an ecosystem with these resources. A food chain outlines who eats whom. A food web is all of the food chains in an ecosystem.
Each organism in an ecosystem occupies a specific trophic level or position in the food chain or web. Producers, who make their own food using photosynthesis or chemosynthesis, make up the bottom of the trophic pyramid.
Primary consumers, mostly herbivores, exist at the next level, and secondary and tertiary consumers, omnivores and carnivores, follow. These animals eat grass, tree bark, aquatic vegetation, and shrubby growth. Herbivores can also be medium-sized animals such as sheep and goats, which eat shrubby vegetation and grasses.
Small herbivores include rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, and mice. These animals eat grass, shrubs, seeds, and nuts. An ecosystem must provide abundant plants to sustain herbivores, and many of them spend the majority of their lives eating to stay alive. If plant availability declines, herbivores may not have enough to eat. This could cause a decline in herbivore numbers, which would also impact carnivores. Herbivores usually have special biological systems to digest a variety of different plants.
Their teeth also have special designs that enable them to rip off the plants and then grind them up with flat molars.
Omnivores have an advantage in an ecosystem because their diet is the most diverse. These animals can vary their diet depending on the food that is most plentiful, sometimes eating plants and other times eating meat.
Herbivores have different digestive systems than omnivores, so omnivores usually cannot eat all of the plants that an herbivore can. Omnivores will also hunt both carnivores and herbivores for meat, including small mammals, reptiles, and insects.
Large omnivores include bears and humans. Examples of medium-sized omnivores include raccoons and pigs. Small omnivores include some fish and insects such as flies. Omnivore teeth often resemble carnivore teeth because of the need for tearing meat.
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