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Time: 10 hours
Level: Introductory
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 Introduction Resource- 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’ series...
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- 1 The omnivores Resource
- 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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- 2.1 Trophic levels Resource
- ‘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 eaters...
- 2.2 Energy flow in ecosystems Resource
- 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 the...
- 2.3 Food chains and food webs Resource
- 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 60 000,...
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| | 3 Is specialisation always advantageous?
- 3 Is specialisation always advantageous? Resource
- 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 in...
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- 4.1 The grizzly bear Resource
- 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...
- 4.2 Other members of the bear family Resource
- 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 sea-ice,...
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- 5 Miss Piggy Resource
- 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 eating...
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| | 6 The good family Procyonidae
- 6 The good family Procyonidae Resource
- 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 species...
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- 7 Of rats and men Resource
- 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 primates,...
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| | 8 What makes a successful omnivore?
- 8 What makes a successful omnivore? Resource
- 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 biology?
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| | References and Acknowledgements | |
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