Emily C. answered • 09/24/20
Animal Caretaker and Behaviorist w/ Graduate Degree in Zoo Management
Good question, and you can go down a huge rabbit hole with this answer in terms of what amino acids and vitamins each animal requires to sustain themselves. I’ll keep it relatively simple for this answer, but feel free to message me if you need specifics.
Zebras are herbivores, so they exclusively eat plants. They spend their days grazing on grass.
Lions are carnivores and exclusively eat meat. They have to hunt for their food and usually don’t eat every single day, because they’ll eat a lot when they catch an animal and that will sustain them for a few days.
Lions have a LOT more muscle to maintain and therefore need to eat a lot of protein. Zebras eat primarily carbohydrates in the form of grasses.
Keep in mind that zebras get their energy from eating grass, and lions get energy from eating the zebra. But each time you go up a level in the food chain, you lose 90% of the energy from the level before. In other words, a zebra only gets about 10% of the energy stored in the grass that it eats, and the lion only gets 10% of that remaining energy from the zebra (google “tropic efficiency” for a diagram) So, pound for pound, the lion has to eat about 10x more zebra than the zebra does grass to get the same amount of energy out of its food.
hope that helps!
