Cross Breeds

Plant and Animal Adaptions: examples for tropical rainforest, structural, physiological, behavioral...?

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1. Sloths are dedicated browsers eating tree foliage. This low nutrient diet requires a lot of digestion but provides little energy for other metabolic activity. Sloths carry host specific algae growing on their hair for cryptic camouflage since they cannot escape predation in other more active ways. Sloth's adapted to foliage based diets rather than compete with a myriad of birds, mammals, and reptiles for high energy resources like fruit and tubers. The sloths further adapted by using the symbiotic algae to hide amidst the foliage since the diet cannot support bursts of activity. This low nutrient content of browse is why most browsing animals seek out other, additional high energy food sources when possible. This classifies most tropical ungulates (hooved animals) as browser/concentrate feeders consuming a mix of foliage and fruit. If they eat just foliage they are folivores if just fruit they are frugivores but most exist in an intermediate continuum of feeding strategies. African duikers, Amazonian brocket deer, and Malaysian muntjacs or chevrotains have converged on feeding strategies despite taxonomic dissimilarity. They fill the same niche in their version of the rainforest biome. They are equivalent small-bodied hooved browser/grazers that consume additional nutrients as well as foliage. Each of these lives in heavily wooded rainforests but eat a range of leaves, grass, blossoms, seeds, fallen fruits and shoots or twigs. Duiker and the others are known for eating small numbers of insects or mice when they must so they have the energy to actively avoid predation and seek forage or mates. Duikers eat some 80% fruit while chevrotain only 68% fruit 10% leaves 20% twigs 2% mixed animal matter, fungi & blossoms.