Diet and Feeding Habits
The Queensland lungfish is primarily nocturnal, and is essentially carnivorous. In captivity it will feed on frogs, earthworms, pieces of meat, and pelleted food. In the wild its prey includes frogs, tadpoles, fishes, a variety of invertebrates, and plant material. No quantitative dietary data is available, but anecdotal observations clearly indicate that the diet of the lungfish changes with development. This is proven to be correlated with a change in dentition.
Lungfish larvae are bottom feeders. They eat micro crustaceans and small Tubifex worms, occasionally supplementing their diet with filamentous algae. Soft foods such as worms and plants are partially crushed with a few quick bites and then swallowed. In the adult lungfish, movement of the prey in and out of the mouth is accompanied by strong adduction of the jaws. This crushing mechanism is coupled with hydraulic transport of the food, achieved by movements of the hyoid apparatus, to position the prey within the oral cavity. The Queensland lungfish exhibits the most primitive version of these biomechanical feeding adaptations and behaviors.
Read more about this topic: Queensland Lungfish
Famous quotes containing the words diet, feeding and/or habits:
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Man may have his opinion as to the relative importance of feeding his body and nourishing his soul, but he is allowed by Nature to have no opinion whatever as to the need for feeding the body before the soul can think of anything but the body’s hunger.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The only ones who are really grateful for the war are the wild ducks, such a lot of them in the marshes of the Rhone and so peaceful ... because all the shot-guns have been taken away completely taken away and nobody can shoot with them nobody at all and the wild ducks are very content. They act as of they had never been shot at, never, it is so easy to form old habits again, so very easy.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)