User:LittleHow/Fallback food

Fallback foods are foods to which humans and other animals shift their diet during famines when preferred foods are not available to eat to avoid starvation. The term is usually applied to the diet of primates as "the term fallback foods is absent in the wider literature on vertebrates".

Primates
It has been argued that the characteristics such as hardness, patch size, and location and seasonal dispersion of fallback foods shape the physiology, socioecology, and behavior of many primates. Examples of primate fallback foods include bark for orangutans, terrestrial herbs for gorillas, pternandra fruits for gibbons, and mature leaves for Maroon Leaf Monkeys. Adaptations in regard to fallback foods include the unusually thick dental enamel of gray-cheeked mangabeys specialized digestive physiology of colobines for low quality foliage