Diet
They are omnivorous – will eat almost anything, from grains and other plant matter to insects, dead or living fish and crustaceans. They have short, pointed, conical teeth, formed in multiple rows called cardiform teeth. Black bullheads have no scales; instead, they have about 100,000 taste receptors placed all over their bodies. Many of these are located on the barbels near their mouths. The receptors help the fish to identify food in their dark habitats. During the winter, black bullheads will decrease food intake, and may stop eating all together. Instead, they will bury themselves around the shore line of the lake in debris, with only their gills exposed. This "hibernation" allows them to survive conditions of low oxygen and low temperature.
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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.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.... Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)