Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) Fact Sheet: Diet & Feeding

Browsers (from Kingdon 1997; Merz 1991)

• Diet
• Eat leaves, twigs, and branches
• Grass consumption typically very low, though long grass may constitute up to 30%-40% of the diet in some populations (Merz 1991)
• White rhinos, in contrast, eat short grass and herbaceous plants, but no leaves/twigs from trees or bushes
• Diverse, consume up to 220 place species
• 99 woody shrubs
• 102 herbs
• 25 grasses
• Diversity dependent on season and amount of rainfall
• Quantity plant material consumed and diversity of species exploited variable
• Hind gut digestion
• As with horses and zebras
• Digest food by bacterial fermentation in hind gut

Methods for determining diet (from Kingdon 1997; Merz 1991)

• Characteristic dung reveals diet
  
• Researchers examine fibrous plant remains in dung to understand an animal's diet
• Characteristics of rhino dung
• Dung composition
• Rhino dung contains small, short twigs
• Unlike elephant dung which contains longer, twisted pieces of woody fiber
• Appearance of dung piles
• 2 parallel grooves emanate from a pile of rhino dung
• Pattern is produced by the rhino as it scrapes the dung pile with its back feet, flinging it away
• Unlike elephant dung which is left in undisturbed piles

Food acquisition (from Kingdon 1997; Merz 1991)

• The prehensile lip helps gather food
• Enables exploitation of different plant resources compared to the diet of the white rhino
• Refer to the above diet section
• Horns provide access to some foods
• Dig up roots
• Break branches

Drinking (from Kingdon 1997; Merz 1991)

• Frequency
• Can go up to 5 days without drinking if food contains sufficient moisture
• Found within a day's travel of water when only dry forage is available
• Relatively tolerant of drought
• Handle drought conditions well compared to many other animal species in the area
• Not susceptible to poisonous tannins in plants that often increase during a drought

Black Rhinoceros at the Chester Zoo.

Image credit: © NIgel Swales from Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Kingdon (1997)
Merz (1991)