T of L: Finding Food

Question 1

For the red panda:
1. What does it eat?
2. What are the plant’s defenses?
3. How does the panda deal with?

Answer 1

1. Bamboo
2. razor-like silica edges
3. Panda’s digestion has evolved to deal with it.

Question 2

For the golden bamboo lemur:
1. What do they eat?
2. What’s the plant’s defense, and how does the lemur overcome?
3. What are the costs?

Answer 2

1. Bamboo
2. Cyanide; the lemur has evolved the ability to absorb the toxins.
3. Costs: lemurs diet is now extremely specialized.

Question 3

For the honeypot ants:
1. What is meant by ‘honeypot’?
2. How does the rest of the hive / workers benefit?

Answer 3

1. They’ve evolved to have a caste that metabolizes food and stores the ‘honey’ created in abdomens that stretch many times the ant’s size.
2. The workers groom the storage ants, and they also induce regurgitation to eat the ‘honey’.

Question 4

For chimpanzees:
1. What are plant defenses for nuts, and what do they use to overcome plant defense?

Answer 4

1. Nuts are in hard shells. Chimps will use tools to crack open nuts.

Question 5

For Macaws
1. What do they eat?
2. How do they overcome the plant’s defenses?
3. What are the costs?

Answer 5

1. Nuts, including toxic nuts.
2. Overcome by eating kaolin first.
3. Time and energy to find kaolin; plus they’re very visible to predators (kaolin cliffs are pale).

Question 6

For the nephila and argyrodes spiders:
1. How big is the nephila spider and her web?
2. How big is the argyrodes spider, and how does it benefit from its size?

Answer 6

1. She’s got a 6 inch leg span and can build a web up to 2 yards!!!!!!!!
2. Argyrodes is very tiny and can use its small size to sneak onto nephila’s web and steal food dropping it onto her own web, or she’ll feed alongside nephila!!!!!!!