It is also a cactus, why do camels eat it as a snack, but we get stabbed and grinned when we touch it?

camel eating cactus

In fact, the snacks of camels are not just cactus. Things like Haloxylon, ghosts, and camel thorns can't escape the poison of camels. Why do they all look like this? Very simple, in order to prevent moisture from evaporating.

About 30 million years ago , a severe drought knocked out average annual precipitation in the Americas. Coupled with the fact that the tall Cordillera Mountains blocked a lot of rain, the western part of America became a desert.

Under the high temperature, many plants have to degenerate the original wide leaves into tiny needles in order to survive. These needle-like leaves not only reduce water evaporation, but also give them a powerful weapon against animal predation . It is precisely because of this that cacti in many places can be flooded.

The "thorn" of camel thorn is the raceme, and the inflorescence is axialized to form this sharp thorn. It may be the result of convergent evolution. In short, these thorny plants have the same purpose, to survive in the desert . However, they never expected that they would meet the formidable enemy of a camel.

A camel can chew a piece of cactus slowly and completely ignore the spines on the cactus. Even those thorns that are almost covered with thorns and have no nutrition at all, they can chew and swallow without expression.

camel's mouth

If you open the camel's mouth, you will see this alien-like scene in front of you. Rather than saying that this is the mouth of a mammal, it looks more like the mouthparts of an alien creature .

The camel's mouth is the complete opposite of what it looks like, and the camel's dull-looking mouth turns out to be full of jagged fleshy spikes. Unexpectedly, the camel also knows to defeat the spikes with spikes.

These fleshy spikes are made of the same composition as our fingernails and are completely painless. Usually, it fits tightly on the inside of the mouth. When the camel eats the cactus, these spikes will stand up. While preventing the mouth from being stabbed, the spines of the cactus will be smoothed in one direction .

And the camel's mouth is very large, and the skin of the mouth is thick and rough, which can effectively prevent the mouth from being pierced by thorns.

Not only that, although the tongues of camels look pink and tender , they are actually very keratinized, and the palate is still a cartilage structure, which is very resistant to piercing.

However, it cannot be said absolutely that it is foolproof for camels to eat cactus. Because although the defense in the mouth is very high, the esophagus of animals is still very fragile.

Therefore, when the camel chews, a large amount of viscous saliva will be secreted in the mouth . They make saliva so viscous not only to save water, but also to act as a lubricant when chewing cactus, protecting the mouth and esophagus.

In any case, it is impossible for a camel to eat a cactus without pain. Because the cactus in the desert is not like the cactus we planted, the thorns are very soft and thin, and it will not hurt if you accidentally prick it .

The spines of cactus in the desert are long and hard. Even if they have iron teeth and copper teeth , eating cactus will not be like eating small green vegetables. But there is no way, there are only so few plants in the desert, and camels have to eat even if they are afraid of pain.

But even if it is eaten, the lethality of the cactus thorns is still there. Thorns that are not fully chewed can still hurt the camel's stomach. So how do they do it?

camel's stomach

Camels are a kind of ruminant. They have three different stomachs, which are rumen, reticulum and abomasum . There is no omasum in cattle that is used to block food and absorb water.

But that doesn't matter either. When the cactus enters the rumen of the camel, up to 40 billion microorganisms and fungi in the digestive system will assist the rumen to digest the crude fiber tissue of the cactus. This step does not take long, and after a rough digestion, the food will be sent to the reticulum.

The role of the reticulum is to filter food . For example, some hard things and indigestible stone debris will be separated by the reticulum and fed back to the mouth for chewing again.

The function of the abomasum is very simple. It is the stomach we understand normally. It contains a large amount of gastric acid and digestive enzymes, which can completely digest the plant fiber of cactus, supply nutrients and water to the body, and finally discharge the residue.

As for those hard cactus spines, it is best if they can be completely digested, and those that cannot be digested will return to the mouth the same way, and let it go through a torrent of tempering again.

Some people may ask, seeing a lot of pictures of camels eating cacti, obviously there are bushes behind them , why not eat the cactus while there is good grass?

In the desert, people lose 0.2 to 1.5 liters of water per hour . Although camels are much stronger than humans, they are still mammals, and water loss is inevitable.

Therefore, camels will rehydrate whenever they are free. An extremely thirsty camel can drink up to 100 liters of water at a time. The succulent stems of cacti have a water content of up to 80%, while other shrubs have only 40% . Although the camel is tall, it is not stupid and big. It is still clear what quenches thirst and what does not.

The camel's water does not exist in the hump, the hump is full of fat. These drank water will be stored in multiple organs such as the camel's stomach chamber and nasal mucosa. This is also the survival strategy summed up by camels in the tens of millions of evolutions .