The digestion process in Ruminants begins by chewing and swallowing their food.
<h3>What are ruminants?</h3>
A ruminant is any herbivorous animal that has a stomach with four compartments, which are tasked with acquiring nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it prior to digestion.
The digestion process in Ruminants begins by chewing and swallowing their food. Ruminants do not completely chew the food they eat, but just consume or gulp as much they can and then swallow the food. This is actually an adaptation by which these animals have evolved to spend as little time as possible feeding so that they are not hunted down by any predators while they are eating.
As mentioned earlier, the stomach of these Ruminants is divided into 4 chambers – rumen, reticulum, omasum, and the abomasum.
The process of digestion begins with the first two chambers of the stomach, the rumen and reticulum by softening the ingested matter. Later the microbes present in the rumen produces the cellulase enzymes required to digest the cellulose.
Once the plant fibres have been broken down to provide vitamins, proteins, and other organic acids, the nutrients are absorbed into the animal’s bloodstream.
Coarse plants are sent further into the next chamber for further digestion. Here is where the further bacterial action takes place and the food is formed into soft chunks called the cud.
This cud produced is regurgitated back into the animal’s mouth where it can be chewed again. The saliva of the cow greatly aids in digesting the cud.
After chewing, the food bypasses the two chambers of the stomach and directly enters the third chamber. The walls of the third chamber mash and compact the food molecules further, and then pass it to the fourth chamber – the abomasum.
The final digestion in the stomach is carried by the abomasum and then passed to the intestine.
Learn more about the ruminants here:
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