Digestion
All living things on our planet need energy to live, to move and give life for their offspring. Nature is very clever in findings the ways on how living organisms can obtain energy to survive. Every time I look at how fast cheetah can run, I wonder where in the world this energy came from? Do you know that Adwaita, the oldest giant tortoise managed to live for 255 years? Where all is energy is coming from? [1]
Well, Digestion is one of the answers. Digestion is something that most living things do and one of the main functions for any living organism survival. I do it, you do it, your cat does it, MY cat does it. It’s pretty much a universal thing. But how does it work and why do I need it to work? We need digestion because it breaks down food for us and turns it into energy much needed for us to function. Food… All of us love food and a lot of living organisms have their favorites. While the human food industry has spent centuries developing unique ways of processing and representing food, it all starts from the moment when you take your first bite. What happens there is the whole new world of mechanical and chemical processes that is not well known by many of us. What we normally might have on our plates (despite of selected cuisine) is simply a collection of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals and our body works really hard to transform it into energy. [2]
Well, Digestion is one of the answers. Digestion is something that most living things do and one of the main functions for any living organism survival. I do it, you do it, your cat does it, MY cat does it. It’s pretty much a universal thing. But how does it work and why do I need it to work? We need digestion because it breaks down food for us and turns it into energy much needed for us to function. Food… All of us love food and a lot of living organisms have their favorites. While the human food industry has spent centuries developing unique ways of processing and representing food, it all starts from the moment when you take your first bite. What happens there is the whole new world of mechanical and chemical processes that is not well known by many of us. What we normally might have on our plates (despite of selected cuisine) is simply a collection of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals and our body works really hard to transform it into energy. [2]
First, we use our mouth to take our food in, chew and break it into small pieces. The enzymes in our saliva begin to break down your food. Swallowing moves food into your stomach where the digestion process continues, meaning your food is breaking down even more. Digested food molecules are absorbed in the small intestine. This means that they pass through the wall of the small intestine and into our bloodstream. Our blood delivers those nutrients to different parts of the body where it’s needed. [3] Any waste from your body would be disposed through the large intestine. There are also a couple of key players in the human digestion system that we can’t ignore: the liver, gallbladder, and pancreas. These three friends produce even more juices to process sophisticated food molecules such as proteins, carbohydrates and fats.
The bottom line is that the digestion process is the delivery of products of digestion (normally glucose) to each cell of your body and this is where energy is produced. It's picked up from the small intestines, glucose is highly concentrated in the blood and is diffused into a cell when it reaches it because of the low concentration. But a vital process of getting energy from glucose begins with cellular respiration. Along with glucose, blood delivers oxygen into each cell. Oxygen is utilized to break the glucose down and stores its energy in ATP. But what is ATP? ATP is a molecule which is used to store energy in its chemical bonds. [4] Think of it like money in your saving account. It's saved but used when needed.
Red Eastern Spotted Newt Diet
The red spotted newt doesn't eat anything too crazy considering the fact that it's already a pretty small fella. They mostly feed on plants and insects such as the pinhead cricket, flightless fruit flies, worms, and everyone's favorite- spiders! Not to mention that they also munch on slugs, snails, and brine shrimp.
Anatomy
Newts like many other living things use digestion as survival. For example what aids the newt in digestion is its small intestine, stomach, pancreas- which helps it break down food. As well as the liver and esophagus. The thing about newts is that they don't have a large intestine which causes them to absorb less nutrients. As well as their teeth being sand paper like and obviously that makes mechanical digestion harder for them, so instead of chewing it and breaking it down mechanically, newts swallow a piece of food whole and digest it chemically as most amphibians do. [3]