> Compared to a carnivore or omnivore, what does a folivore eat?And the answer: leaves.While carnivores eat meat and herbivores eat plants, folivores specifically eatthe leaves of a plant and stay away from the stem or roots. Some commonfolivores are the panda, sloth, and koala.Photo credit: CGTN[https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514d7a6b544d33457a6333566d54/index.html]Unlikewith fruits, plants don't actually want animals to eat their leaves. Leaves arehow plants are able to get their energy from the sun, so plants have evolved tomake them pretty darn difficult for animals to eat. Often, leaves are full oftoxins, have a bitter taste, are very difficult to chew, and are made of largecellulose molecules that are difficult to break down into usable sugars. Due tothese defenses, animals who eat leaves need a lot of specialized traits. Folivorous mammals have broad teeth with high, sharp cusps connected by shearingcrests. These traits allow the folivores to physically break down leaves whenchewing (thus the "shear" in "shearing crests"). Folivores then have tochemically break down cellulose molecules into usable energy, so these animalsneed specialized digestive systems. Some folivores have complex stomachs withmultiple compartments, but all leaf eaters have large, long intestines andspecial gut bacteria that can break up cellulose. Folivores are usually thelargest bodied of all mammals and spend a large portion of their day digestingtheir food, so they are often fairly inactive creatures (see: sloths). Did you know?Koalas can eat over two pounds of poisonous eucalyptus leaves every day! Theirspecial fiber-digesting organ, called a caecum, helps to detoxify the chemicalsin the leaves. However, they can be quite picky eaters, eating less than 50 ofover 700 eucalypt species. Even then, they’ll often choose leaves at the top ofthe tallest trees that contain more liquid and nutrients.