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Hindgut fermentation is a digestive process seen in monogastric herbivores (animals with a simple, single-chambered stomach). Cellulose is digested with the aid of symbiotic microbes including bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. [1] The microbial fermentation occurs in the digestive organs that follow the small intestine: the cecum and large ...
However, their ability to extract energy from cellulose digestion is less efficient than in ruminants. [2] Herbivores digest cellulose by microbial fermentation. Monogastric herbivores which can digest cellulose nearly as well as ruminants are called hindgut fermenters, while ruminants are called foregut fermenters. [3]
Fermentation is crucial to digestion because it breaks down complex carbohydrates, such as cellulose, and enables the animal to use them. Microbes function best in a warm, moist, anaerobic environment with a temperature range of 37.7 to 42.2 °C (99.9 to 108.0 °F) and a pH between 6.0 and 6.4.
Some animals, particularly ruminants and termites, can digest cellulose with the help of symbiotic micro-organisms that live in their guts, such as Trichonympha. In human nutrition , cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber , acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation .
One of the most significant differences in hay digestion is between ruminant animals, such as cattle and sheep, and nonruminant, hindgut fermentors, such as horses. Both types of animals can digest cellulose in grass and hay, but do so by different mechanisms. Because of the four-chambered stomach of cattle, they are often able to break down ...
Like other ruminants, bovids have four-chambered stomachs, which allow them to digest plant material, such as grass, that cannot be used by many other animals. Ruminants (and some others like kangaroos , rabbits , and termites ) are able to use micro-organisms living in their guts to break down cellulose by fermentation .
The animal absorbs the fatty acids, vitamins and nutrient content on passing the partially digested food from the rumen to the omasum. This decreases the pH level and initiates the release of enzymes for further breakdown of the food which later passes to the abomasum to absorb remaining nutrients before excretion.
A large percentage of herbivores also have mutualistic gut flora made up of bacteria and protozoans that help to degrade the cellulose in plants, [1] whose heavily cross-linking polymer structure makes it far more difficult to digest than the protein- and fat-rich animal tissues that carnivores eat. [2]