Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 84

Folivorous primates focus on eating leaves but still get plenty of variety in most of their diets — they also eat fruit and seeds if they’re available. The red howler monkey of South America dines on nearly 200 different species of plants and apparently prefers eating younger rather than more mature leaves. The most folivorous primates are characterized by the following traits:

 Generally medium size (or large, compared to insectivores), averaging 5 kilograms (10 pounds)

 A nocturnal lifestyle

 Mixed sharp and flat teeth for processing vegetation (snipping it with the incisors, shearing it with the premolars, and then crushing it with the molars)

 A long and complex digestive tract used to process vegetation

Leaves are hard to digest, so folivores’ guts are larger and more complex than those of many other primates; essentially, leaves ferment in primate stomachs. And because leaves don’t have a very high caloric content (relative to a lot of other potential foods), folivores eat a lot of them. (It takes a lot of leaves to make up a pound, which is about what some captive lemurs eat each day.) How the food is dispersed in the trees, what season it is, and how the animals get around are all linked in complex ways.

Folivorous primates have very specialized and sensitive innards for their unique diet. Zoos often have difficulty keeping folivores healthy because they can’t supply the proper kinds of leaves. Special feeding programs have to be established to properly care for folivores, such that keepers realize they’re not just feeding the primate but also the bacterial colony in the primate’s gut that ferments the leaves.