Diet
Alligator snappers are opportunistic carnivores more often at a young age, but are also scavengers. Fishermen have glorified the species' ability to catch fish and to deplete fish populations. Minnows are usually the main source of meat for the species at a young age. They will eat almost anything they can catch.
Their natural diet consists primarily of fish and dead fish carcasses (usually thrown overboard by fishermen), invertebrates, carrion, and amphibians, but they are also known to eat snakes, and even other turtles. In captivity they may consume almost any kind of meat provided, including beef, chicken and pork although these are not always healthy on a day to day basis. They will refuse to eat if exposed to temperature extremes. Though not a primary food source for them, adult Alligator snappers have been known to kill and eat small alligators that they have been confined with, such as in a net, small bog, or poorly planned aquarium display.
Read more about this topic: Alligator Snapping Turtle
Famous quotes containing the word diet:
“Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated—serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“Literary tradition is full of lies about poverty—the jolly beggar, the poor but happy milkmaid, the wholesome diet of porridge, etc.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“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)