Andy_Ross
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Which has a similar taste to crocodile.
Which has a similar taste to crocodile.
Carnivores generally eat herbivores, but can eat omnivores, and occasionally other carnivores. May former be the preferance later compusion, if herbivores are scrace or not available.
Many time, I see, dogs leave some food for crows, who surround him on looking a dog taking food and raise much voice. I don't feel, that was just surplus food to dogs. Probably, there is a symbiosis relation or some mutual understanding in between species other than herbivores. Either for cleaning the remains of foods, to avoid diseases or probably next time others Carnivores may also arrange some food for them in scarcity.
Correct. And they're knackered........absolutely cream crackered...........after a chase and kill. They'll often sit there for 10 minutes getting their breath back before starting to feed, or carrying it off for their youngsters, if it's small. If they've got a kill, there is no incentive to get another one anyway. I have seen a leopard kill a vulture, just because it was pissed off with it. It leapt up and plucked it out of the air with one paw, and didn't attempt to eat it.
Nah. I've seen vultures pulling bits out of a carcass whilst a lion is gnawing at the other end.
LTC8K6
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I recall seeing a male lion kill the alpha female hyena near a kill on some TV show. Caught her and broke her back. I don't think the lions ate the hyena, though.
There had basically been a constant war between the pack of hyenas and the pride of lions over the territory and the kills, and the male lion decided to end it permanently.
IIRC, you could see the conflict between the groups escalating as time went on and the show was following the conflict.
Searching Youtube yields a lot of lions killing, and sometimes eating, hyenas.
There had basically been a constant war between the pack of hyenas and the pride of lions over the territory and the kills, and the male lion decided to end it permanently.
IIRC, you could see the conflict between the groups escalating as time went on and the show was following the conflict.
Searching Youtube yields a lot of lions killing, and sometimes eating, hyenas.
He'd have been very disappointed, then. His action would have had no impact on the survival of that hyaena clan, and nor would it have changed their behaviour. Hyaenas are very good at avoiding contact with lions unless they want it. My daughter actually tracked hyaenas on the Maasai Mara for 4 months, plotting their whereabouts in relation to that of lions. Hyaenas are often the apex predators in areas where lions have been killed off, such as Liuwa in Zambia.
Belz...
Fiend God
Vultures can fly. That kind of negates the land speed issue.
MRC_Hans
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If they can get into the air fast enough. The vulture is a glider and is not that nimble on the ground.
Well, lots of good answers. My own guess is that predators are conservative. Most have a quite tight energy budget and can't afford too many fruitless hunts. So they much prefer to hunt prey they know.
They are also very cautious, sometimes bordering on cowardly, because a wounded predator can't hunt, so it risks starvation before it can recover. So it is probably not in its programming to hunt scavengers.
Hans
MRC_Hans
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I don't think that is very probable. More likely, the dog feels unsafe surrounded by noisy crows, which are not only stressing it, but also may alert other dogs to the food.
There is a species level tendency for many birds (e.g. seagulls) to alert others of a source of food, but that is far from unselfish: The species gain from it and the individual gains safety in the numbers.
Hans
Swordfishtrombone
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I think the main reason why predators don't just try and kill and eat the vultures, may be very simple: when there are vultures around close enough for the predator to have any chance of catching them, there tends ALSO to be a carcass of some animal that they are trying to eat.
If you have a choice between eating the carcass (that won't run, or fight back), it makes little sense to expend any more energy chasing a bird (and thus leaving the carcass to the other birds), for the uncertain reward of a smaller meal, instead of the larger, safer meal that is right in front of you.
If you have a choice between eating the carcass (that won't run, or fight back), it makes little sense to expend any more energy chasing a bird (and thus leaving the carcass to the other birds), for the uncertain reward of a smaller meal, instead of the larger, safer meal that is right in front of you.
MRC_Hans
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I was referring to a particular situation where a female cheetah was faced with trying to rear a litter of six (twice the normal number). In that situation, every scrap of food would have counted. However, I think you are otherwise right, and it is probably not possible for it to diverge from its standard behavior.
Hans
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This set me thinking about why vultures only scavenge, instead of hunting. I mean who/what wouldn't prefer fresh food to stale spoilt yucky stuff?
The first article I clicked when I googled this (this one) does explain that, and goes on to say : "A vulture’s digestive tract can easily handle bubonic plague, rabies, distemper, anthrax, and most all other evil, little, biological nasties that threaten other forms of life on Earth. It’s all good to them. How can they do this? It’s complex. But basically, their digestive tract has two tools it uses: One is a very low Ph in their digestive juices. ..."
So with all of this poisonous crap (poisonous to other animals, including, I suppose, cheetahs) sitting inside vultures, vultures would probably be the equivalent of what poisonous plants are to herbivores. Evolution has, I expect, taught herbivores to leave poisonous plants alone ; and similarly, I guess, evolution will have taught cheetahs to not eat vultures.
All of this is just my conjecture, without a shred of actual evidence backing this conjecture : but it seems to make sense.
The first article I clicked when I googled this (this one) does explain that, and goes on to say : "A vulture’s digestive tract can easily handle bubonic plague, rabies, distemper, anthrax, and most all other evil, little, biological nasties that threaten other forms of life on Earth. It’s all good to them. How can they do this? It’s complex. But basically, their digestive tract has two tools it uses: One is a very low Ph in their digestive juices. ..."
So with all of this poisonous crap (poisonous to other animals, including, I suppose, cheetahs) sitting inside vultures, vultures would probably be the equivalent of what poisonous plants are to herbivores. Evolution has, I expect, taught herbivores to leave poisonous plants alone ; and similarly, I guess, evolution will have taught cheetahs to not eat vultures.
All of this is just my conjecture, without a shred of actual evidence backing this conjecture : but it seems to make sense.
MRC_Hans
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Yes, I agree. Of course, muscles and such would probably not be affected, but still, they could very well be on the instinctive "don't eat" list.
Hans
An elk in the paw is worth 2 vultures in the bush?
As to whether scavengers are tasty. Pigs are pretty much scavengers.
MRC_Hans
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If they get the chance, yes. However, I doubt that a specific diet of carcasses would for anything good for the taste of ham.
Hans
bruto
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I think it takes a while for a cheetah to stand, start running, and get up to speed. When they're already afoot, they can run down anything on earth, but they're already loping along then. A vulture may be slow on the ground, but they get aloft with reasonable speed, and outrunning something is quite different from dodging it.
I'm guessing that, as others have noted, the amount of energy spent on trying to catch a vulture is simply not worth the reward, when a carcass is nearby, and it would not surprise me a bit to find that vultures are nasty tasting too.
As for some of those other critters, although penguin may not be choice, it certainly can be eaten, as the members of the Shackleton expedition, among others, found to their great benefit.
Although not exclusively scavengers, hyenas do a lot of scavenging, and seem to be edible, at least to some other animals, including people. I don't know how hyena tastes, but if one dies, things come and eat it up.
Hyenas have yummy eyeballs. It took a couple more days for the rest to be gobbled up.
bruto
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Yes, sort of. There's a difference between depth of field (which is the area in some degree of focus) and perspective. A long lens reduces depth of field, but more importantly it compresses perspective, making distant objects appear closer.
If you take a wide angle picture, objects close up look much bigger than those far away, and perspective is exaggerated. Think of the radical example of silly pictures of dogs, in which a very wide lens is brought very close to the nose, producing a funny picture of a dog with an enormous nose and a tiny body.
If you use a telephoto lens, you must, of course, be further away to fill the frame with the same thing that filled the frame in a wide shot. If you took a wide shot from the same distance and then cropped it, it would be the same as a telephoto shot, but that's not what we do, since definition is lost. We go directly to the telephoto, and that view will show foreground and background at much closer to the same size, decreasing the effect of perspective, and seeming to compress distance.
A "normal" lens (about 50 mm. on a full frame or 35 mm. camera, 35 on DX) will provide a perspective that is more or less what you see with your eye, and thus makes it easier to estimate relative distances. Very wide or very long lenses will make it very difficult to judge distance.