|MadSci Network: Zoology|
Question: What is the hungriest animal? Well that depends on how you define "hungry" "Eagerly desirous, craving" - The Reader's Digest Great Encyclopedic Distionary But how to measure "hunger"? For shear volumne, Blue Whales probably take the prize at about 8 tons of krill a day. http://www.nmfs.gov/prot_res/cetacean/cetacean.html For voracious appetites, the pigmy shrew takes it, eating twice its body weight in insects a day http://museum.nhm.uga.edu/~GAWildlife/Mammals/Insectivora/insectivora.html Note the correlation between size and "hunger" . This is based on a biological fact that heat loss scales by surface area (i.e. approximately the square of body length) while heat generation scales by body mass (i.e. the cube of body length). http://biology.wsc.mass.edu/biology/courses/hoag/vertphys/97spring/metrates.htm However, very big animals simply have very big appetites! Notice this applies to mammals only since they are homeotherms. Other animals do not maintain a constant body temperature, so their food needs are considerably less. For most wide ranging, human beings take the prize, eating almost anything and consuming almost everything! http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Environment_and_Nature/ And a hungry mind "grazing on the 'net" http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/livetext-nf/docs/graze.html
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