Acknowledgements
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8 What makes a successful omnivore?
From what has been said already, there's good evidence that the key physical characteristic of the great majority of omnivores is a non-specialist dentition. What about other aspects of their...
View Article7 Of rats and men
The two most successful species of omnivore – humans and the brown (or Norwegian) rat – both arose within mammalian groups that are not particularly omnivorous. Most members of our own family, the...
View Article6 The good family Procyonidae
As DA comments, this family is such an odd and varied collection that it doesn't have a common name [p. 170]. Its most familiar member (after which the family is named) is the raccoon, but the 19...
View Article5 Miss Piggy
As the earliest mammals – the insectivores – were specialists, it follows that the omnivore lifestyle must have arisen at some later stage in a group or groups of non-omnivores. In fact, both seed...
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4.2 Other members of the bear family
Other omnivorous species of bear include the Asian black bear, the North American black bear and the Andean spectacled bear. Although polar bears spend their winters hunting seals out on the Arctic...
View Article4.1 The grizzly bear
There are three activities in Section 4, asking you to summarise information in the form of lists. In the first two, the answers are given but in the third, about the diet of the giant panda, they are...
View Article3 Is specialisation always advantageous?
Specialisation generally implies the possession of adaptations that make animals particularly effective or efficient in one or more aspects of their lives. In many of the examples used in other units...
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2.3 Food chains and food webs
This section includes two graphs. Figure 2 has the standard numerical values on its axes, in this case years from 1830 to 1930 on the horizontal axis and number of lynx furs traded, from zero to 60...
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2.2 Energy flow in ecosystems
You are about to meet some very large numbers, expressed in scientific notation, and some new units. The new units are those that are used to measure the amount of solar energy received by a part of...
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2.1 Trophic levels
‘All flesh is grass’; this somewhat paradoxical biblical quotation really is only a restatement of what was more formally explained in previous units in this series. The materials needed by plant...
View Article1 The omnivores
As you work through this unit you will come across boxes, like this one, which give you advice about the study skills that you will be developing as you progress through the unit. To avoid breaking up...
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By the end of this unit you should be able to:explain the concept of energy transfer between trophic levels;outline the usefulness and limitations of food chains and food webs;using examples, weigh up...
View ArticleIntroduction
That mammals need energy to support all aspects of their lives, be it breathing, running, excreting, repairing cells, reproducing, keeping warm, is a central, unifying theme of the ‘Studying mammals’...
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