Gorillas are the closest animal to human beings. After all, human beings have evolved from gorillas and apes through evolution. Gorillas can be found in the wild, living amongst the trees. Much like humans, gorillas require a steady diet, whether that be through plants or other sources as long as it keeps them energized and ready to face their day.
Gorillas are omnivorous creatures. This means they enjoy both plant based meals as well as high protein ones. This might make you think that they consume meat in order to get their fair share of protein. While they do have meat in some capacity, it does not come from the source you might imagine it would.
What Do Gorillas Eat?
Gorillas, as stated before, are omnivores. This means they enjoy both plants and high protein meals as part of their diet.
Plant Based
When it comes to their plant based diet,which is what they enjoy at most times, gorillas stick to the basics. Everything they eat can easily be found in their natural habitat. They mostly chew on bamboo shoots, fruits, stems, leaves, as well as vines, roots, and flowers. Since gorillas are mostly carnivorous, they take full advantage of the available food around them.
Animal Based
While gorillas are mostly carnivorous, they do enjoy the occasional high protein diet. This includes things like termites, ants, larvae, and caterpillars. They also find a way to get a few extra calories by preying on invertebrates.
It is important to note that while gorillas do enjoy the insect diet occasionally, that is not their original diet. They tend to stray away from meats and towards bamboo shoots.
Why Do They Have Canines?
It is fair to question why gorillas have canines considering they don’t hunt animals for prey. The answer is simple. While gorillas avoid a meat based diet most times, and stay away from mammals completely, they do require their strong, sharp canines in order to bite into bamboo shoots so they can eat. Bamboo shoots are tough and require lots of strength to break apart. A gorilla’s canines help it to eat easily.
Gorillas and Their Eating Habits
It is important to understand that gorillas don’t overfeed. This means that instead of finding one area of the forest and eating solely from there, they spread their diet out evenly over the entire forest. This allows plants to regrow effectively. Gorillas eat one part of the plant and then move on to another to ensure that they still have more to come back to later. If they destroyed the plant entirely, they wouldn’t have had food to come back to in order to consume it later.
How Much Do They Eat?
Since gorillas are bigger animals, we can assume that their diet would be a significant amount. They would also need to eat a large amount to ensure they are able to reserve energy when walking through the wild all day.
On average, an adult female gorilla would eat around 18 to 20 kg of vegetation on a daily basis. Apart from this, an adult male gorilla would eat roughly around 30 kg of vegetation every day.
Plants Eaten by Gorillas
Here is a list of plants eaten by gorillas as they walk through the wild.
- Piper capense
- Englerina
- Ficus natalensis
- Ganodarma
- Teclea nobilis
These plants keep the gorillas fed and hydrated through the day. This way they are able to get through the day without any issues or setbacks in their dietary needs.
Gorilla’s Digestive System
A gorilla’s digestive system reflects that of a herbivore. Their food digests extremely slowly since nutrients are hard to digest all at one time. These nutrients slowly pass through the digestive tract where they are then turned into energy reserves that can be used throughout the day.
However, since plants have lower nutritional value when compared to meats which are high in protein, more frequent meals are required in order to reach the energy marker they need to reach in order to have some in reserves at all times.
Conclusion
While gorillas are omnivores, they are mostly focused on their plant diet. This includes them using their sharp canines to cut through bamboo shoots and other fruits in order to keep themselves energized. However, they do use insects such as ants and caterpillars in order to ensure they continue to ingest protein as well. This form of meat allows them to last longer than the plant based diet would allow them to.
With the amount of food that gorillas consume on a daily basis, they need a lot of nutrients and protein to stay healthy and fully functional. Their digestive systems work very slowly when it comes to digesting nutrients so their intake of insects keeps them energized and the plant based diet allows them to top off the energy consistently.
