Diet Traits in Primates
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees live in African rain forests, grasslands, and woodlands. They do walk on all fours, but live and sleep in trees. Chimpanzees are usually fruit and plant eaters, but also consume, insects, eggs, and meat. They have a very broad diet that consists of hundreds of foods. They are even known to be smart enough to shape and form tools using sticks to get to insects and other prey. In chimpanzees they have adapted to having a very wide variety of foods in their diet.
Orangutans
Orangutans live in Sumatra and Borneo rain forests. With their long arms they are well suited to live in the trees where they build nests using leaves and branches. Since the rain is so harsh they often build umbrellas out of large leaves to protect them from the rain. During the daylight hours they search and gather for their food which consists of fruit,leaves,bark,insects, and on rare occasions meat.
Mountain Gorillas
There are only 700 Mountain Gorillas left in existence and they live in the Virunga Mountains in central africa, Rwanda,Uganda,and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A silver back gorilla that commands them tells them when it is time to eat their vegetarian diet of roots, shoot, fruits, wild celery, bark, and pulp.
Baboons
Baboons live in either Africa or Arabia. Baboons have become destructive to farms as they have become destructive to most farms because of the Baboons diet of crops, grasses, seeds, barks, roots, and they also have a taste for meat.
Spider Monkey
Spider monkeys are found in Central and South America and can also be found as far north as Mexico. Spider monkeys find food in the tree tops and survive on nuts, fruits, leaves, bird eggs, and spiders. Living in the trees they have adapted to the food up there. You can see this because none of their food groups exist on the floor.
Its interesting that some of the species have a taste for meat. I didn't realize that, but I guess when you think about it, it makes sense. Baboons for example, don't specifically live in trees so, they would be likely to eat the meat that can be found on the floor.
ReplyDeleteThere was a specific group of primates that the guidelines asked you to cover. Gorillas and orangutans were not among them. Missing lemurs and gibbons.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to spider monkeys (and also lemurs and gibbons), there is often an assumption being made by students regarding the arboreality of these primates, kind of a "they live in the trees so they eat what's in the trees". But why do they live in the trees? It is an interesting question of causality. Did primates move into the trees because they were going for the food availability there? Or did they move into the trees for another reason, such as predation, and adapted to the available food? This is important because there is a whole world of available food below the forest canopy that these primates are not utilizing. It is worth asking "why not"?
While the topic of human/baboon interaction is interesting, it doesn't apply to this discussion where we are interested in the influence of the environment on the diet of these primates. Baboons have one of the most diverse diets among all primates (except perhaps humans and chimpanzees). How can you use their environment to explain this?
So how does the chimpanzee environment help to explain the diversity of their diet? Could there be a connection between diet and the fact that they live both in and out of trees?
Missing the summary?