When i heard we were doing something with owl pellets in biology i thought we were working with owl feces, But owl pellets are masses of teeth hair and feathers of the animals it would eat like rats, small rabbits and other things. Owls regurgitate their food because owls and other birds have weak stomach muscles which means they cant digest all of their food properly and regurgitate a pellet every 20 hours.
The materials we used were owl pellets, dissecting needle/toothpicks and tweezers, some paper and a bone chart.
Next we had to measure the owl pellet we got and our pellet was 5cm in length and 3cm in width, their was fur and some feathers.
What i know about the digestive system of an owl is that they dont fully digest their food because their stomach muscles are to weak to want that is what causes them to regurgitate.
The kind of animals found in an owl pellet ecosystem are clothes moths, carpet beetles and fungi.
The other types of birds that form pellets are gerbes, herons, cormorants, gulls, terns, kingfishers, crows, jays, dippers, shrikes, swallows and most shorebirds. What you would find in a pellet of a seagull would most likely be crabs, fish or lobsters.
No comments:
Post a Comment