Question

Explain the digestive system and the digestion process of camel .

Answer 1

The belly of the camel is enormous, distending out from behind the chest, most of it a giant 100 litre sack of rotting vegetation, sometimes called the rumen. The heat generated by the fermentation is so great that the rumen has to be situated immediately under the belly muscles to let the heat dissipate to the outside. The contents are repeatedly churned by waves of muscle contractions, and every now and then, some of the green sludge is belched back into the mouth, ground between the teeth, soaked in saliva and gulped back down again. Often, in an evening, the only sound to disturb the quiet of a desert camp is the sound of camels chewing the cud.

The rumen is not a stomach since it has no glands and secretes no enzymes. Only the saliva has enzymes. The rumen is a fermentation vessel charged with bacteria and protozoa that break down cellulose and assimilate it while discarding volatile fatty acids as the end product of their energy metabolism.

Since no vertebrate has ever evolved an enzyme to digest cellulose, the camel is happy to leave it to the microbes. The camel only has to crop the vegetation during the day and then eruct and ruminate at leisure in the evening. It takes up to 50 hours to completely process the contents of a rumen. Evolution has never developed a fast way of digesting cellulose

Answer 2

Digestive Processes. The processes of digestion include six activities: ingestion, propulsion, mechanical or physical digestion, chemical digestion, absorption, and defecation. The first of these processes, ingestion, refers to the entry of food into thealimentary canal through the mouth.