Examples of Piscivorous animals

Piscivorous animals are those that feed mainly on fish. They are a subgroup within the animals called carnivores , within the classification that separates the animals according to their source of food.

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Physical and behavioral characteristics

The characteristics of piscivorous animals are to have large legs, with long claws, and also to have a very developed calcar which is precisely what allows them to catch fish.

In general, the constant movements that fish make in the water and how strange that surface is to other kinds of animals make it very difficult to capture them. However, when it comes to birds, piscivorous animals are generating strategies to make their prey , which they detect from some kind of disturbance in the water. There are three important ones:

The search in height is that where the animal rests about half a meter above the water.
The search at low altitude is the one that has the animal waiting about ten centimeters from the water with its body parallel, the legs stretched back and the feet just above emitting other types of signals.
The internal search is the one that has the animal introducing the feet raking with its claws in the water where it detected the disturbance.

Piscivorous marine animals

In addition to birds, some piscivores are marine animals with a very large physique and feed on smaller fish. In this way, the existence of piscivorous animals plays a central role in relation to life at sea, and causes some fish to develop associated defensive behaviors .

One of them is mimicry , the ability of some fish to develop crystalline colors that make them practically unrecognizable in the eyes of predators . However, sometimes predators also camouflage themselves to catch the fish finding them by surprise.

Piscivorous dinosaurs

Among the birds that feed on fish appears a considerable amount of extinct dinosaurs, which inhabited the plant millions of years ago. This is striking since sometimes they were terrestrial animals of great size, but that nevertheless were able to adapt to satisfy their need to feed on the basis of fish.

The Baryonyx, for example, developed a long, low snout with narrow jaws full of teeth, and claws like hooks to help him look for prey; the reptile Plesiosaurus, on the other hand, inhabited the earth and had U-shaped jaws and sharp teeth, which could have served as a trap for the fish.