How many "meals," or eating-sessions, do various different animals have throughout their day?
Humans having 3 square meals always feels like a privilige and almost a type of over-eating to me, when i think about what a struggle it actually is to acquire food in the wild.
Most people seem to feed their pets morning food and afternoon/evening food. But nature documentaries have you believe that carnivores eat once a day if they're lucky. Is there an idealised amount that a carnivore shouod actually be eating, which they usually fall short of?
2 replies
Completely depends on the animal. Many herbivores eat nearly continuously but carnivorous animals with low metabolisms like deep sea fish or snakes may not eat for months at a time. As warm-blooded omnivores we tend to eat fairly frequently but we're still between those two poles.
In general it's less about frequency than about overall food intake. Carnivores by nature of the difficulty of catching prey are more feast or famine. But again, it all depends on the exact species in question.
Thank you for the answer, i didn't know about deep sea fish tending to be carnivores