Diet
Although generally speaking, manatees are herbivores, the African manatee also eats clams, mollusks, and fish they find in nets. The majority of the diet of the African manatee is composed of many different types of flora found above or hanging over the water, instead of submerged. African manatees inhabiting rivers eat mostly overhanging plants growing on the river banks. The diets of African manatees living in estuaries consist of just mangrove trees. Each day, the African manatee will eat about 4 to 9 percent of its body weight in wet vegetation. Microorganisms in the African manatee's long large intestine (which measures up to 20 metres or 66 feet in length) aid the manatee in digesting the large quantity and variety of vegetation it takes in every day.
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Famous quotes containing the word diet:
“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.”
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