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Silverback gorilla diet
Silverback gorilla diet






Their feeding habit therefore allows for quick replenishment to occur. They allow for the regrowth of the vegetation, and are constantly rotating from one place to another. Gorillas are very important in their ecological niche, they are very selective and do not complete all the vegetation in the area they feed from. They use this enormous strength to break up vegetation in order to eat the part of that plant they are interested in. The mountain gorillas are the largest and by far the strongest primates on earth. Methods of Collecting Food – How Mountain Gorillas collect their food The Mountain Gorillas are afraid of water and therefore do not consume it separately however, the vegetation they it is highly succulent and therefore provides the water they need to survive. The adult mountain gorilla consumes about 18 Kilograms of food on a daily basis. The mountain Gorillas are also known to occasionally eat ants, snails, and grubs also taking up 2% of their diet. Since the mountain Gorillas live at a high altitude, there is hardly more fruit they can consume compared to the lowland gorillas whose diet is mostly composed of fruit. 7% of their diet is composed of edible roots, 3 percent flowers and 2 percent fruits. The Mountain Gorillas are known to consume over 142 plant species, they eat leaves, shoots and stems off plants and this is about 86% of their diet. Being the largest primate on earth, they need a lot of food to survive and their diet is composed of mainly plant live.

silverback gorilla diet

What do gorillas eat, The Mountain Gorilla Diet – The Giant Mountain Gorillas of Virunga, Bwindi and Mgahinga are herbivores.

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  • "It just does not work the other way around."įindings published February 25 in the online journal PLoS ONE. Plus, "most herbivores can digest meat quite well," said study co-author Michael Hofrieter, a geneticist also at the Max Planck Institute. (See "'Loving' Bonobos Seen Killing, Eating Other Primates.") If gorillas do eat meat, they wouldn't be the first great apes to do so.Ĭhimpanzees and their bonobo cousins are known to hunt and eat other mammals, including monkeys. Gorillas Wouldn't Be Alone in Eating Monkeys "I don't really think they're eating meat." "There's plenty of opportunities" for adding mammal DNA to gorilla scat after the fact, Schubert said. Or the mammals "might have just licked it, sniffed it, or peed on it," Schubert said. When gorillas eat the ants, they may also be ingesting-and later expelling-the mammal DNA in the ants' digestive tracts, the study authors speculate.Īnother possibility is that the mammal DNA came from live monkeys or duikers that had been probing the gorilla feces for edible seeds or other leftover plant bits.

    silverback gorilla diet

    There may well be more mundane explanations for the surprising finding-explanations that'd have to be ruled out before gorillas could be reclassified as meat-eaters, said study co-author Grit Schubert, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.įor example, gorillas are known to eat ants that scavenge the carcasses and bones of monkeys and other mammals. Gorillas Eating Insects That Eat Mammals? The discovery raises the possibility that gorillas might have a secret meat habit-scavenging or hunting discretely. While some zoo specimens are known to eat meat, wild gorillas eat only plants and fruit, along with the odd insect-as far as scientists know (see video of wild gorillas feasting on figs).īut a recent study found DNA from monkeys and small forest antelopes called duikers in the feces of wild African western lowland gorillas in Loango National Park in Gabon. Like the vegetarian who can't resist the occasional burger, the otherwise herbivorous gorilla might succumb to cravings for its evolutionary cousins, a new study hints.








    Silverback gorilla diet