Background: I’m working on a new project which, in a nutshell, consumes large files of data and then spends countless hours processing them. Nothing about this is too hard, except of course for coming up with the name for it.
So help me out here - what are some of those animals that famously consume a huge meal upfront and then spend a couple of weeks digesting it? Megafauna is preferable - I’d be much less interested in some aphid that only bites a leaf once a year and goes to sleep than in an anaconda that wolfs down a whole deer every six months.
So have at it - who has the record for infrequent eating?
Female polar bears will go without food or water for up to eight months before giving birth.
Komodo dragons have been known to consume up to 80% of their body weight in a single meal. Although they generally don’t go without food for more than a month.
Don’t male penguins go for several months without food while they incubate their eggs between their feet and their belly feathers? Of course, Linux beat you to the penguin motif, but still…
I think I heard that some kinds of ticks (the little parasites) can go up to 3 years without eating, but it’d be surprising if they could live that long under any circumstances, wouldn’t it?
What about those desert frogs that lay dormant, often for several years, until it rains. Then they act furiously to reproduce and lay eggs? Sorry, I don’t have a specific name.
If it’s megafauna you want, then Anaconda (which may something the size of a pig every four or five months or so) or a crocodile would be the way to go.
I don’t know that anyone knows how long they take to digest a meal, but some deep sea fish swallow prey longer than they are.
In Song of the Dodo , David Quammen wrote about giant tortoises and their ability to survive extended period without food. In what was to me a disturbing image, he wrote about sailors in times past travelling with tortoises for food because they were convenient two ways: you didn’t need to feed them, and if you flipped them on their backs they were stranded in that position until they were dinner weeks later.
Emperor penguins. There are lots of other species that don’t do that. And the females do the same thing-- they take turns. But if things keep going as they are, their lives are going to get a lot easier!
I feel foolish questioning someone who probably knows better than I, but are you are sure about this? I recall a guide at the San Antonio Zoo mentioning that an anaconda needs only about four to five hundred pounds of food to live a normal lifetime (She confirmed my comment that the meat of about three capybaras would suffice if spread out over the years.)
I heard a lecture by someone who was doing a radio-tracking study of anacondas in northern South America. It’s been a while, but as I recall she found they eat a large prey item (capybara or larger) a couple times a year. Since a capybara weighs 140 pounds, that’s on the order of 300 pounds per year.
How much food they need will depend on size, but since average weight of an adult anaconda is on the order of 300 pounds, and they can weigh over 400, I think that it’s impossible that they need only 400-500 pounds over the course of a lifetime. They certainly don’t have that kind of energy conversion efficiency!
They no doubt eat more frequently when they are small and their metabolism is higher. Some references say they live 10 years or more. If we assume even 5 years as an adult, that’s about 1500 pounds right there. I suspect an Anaconda would easily eat more than a ton of food during its lifetime. I wonder what assumptions the zookeeper’s figures were based on.
Thanks. It was a while back, and it was an after hours tour. The guide may not have known herself, though it’s more likely that I’m not remembering correctly.
Spiders have to be up there in terms of time without food relative to total lifespan. Brown recluse spiders live one to two years, and can go up to 6 months without a meal. (cite)
A lot of you guys are missing the essence of the OP’s request; I don’t think that when he asked for records of ‘infrequent eating’ he meant ascetics. I think he meant animals that perform such gluttonous feats of digestion that they need a year’s downtime to recover.
Crocodiles and Constrictors certainly do perform such feats, but unfortunately they have much more salient traits that they are better known for, so naming the program after them might not work so well. (Maybe a specific subspecies of Croc?)
Sharks, as a rule, have very slow digestion, but I don’t know how many of them are big on gorging. Still, you might find a species of shark with an appropriate name. (i.e. Megamouth)
You could also name your program after the things that do the work of digestion, gastrointestinal flora. The most common genus of bacteria found in mammals is Bacteroides. Termites take advantage of the protist Trichonympha in order to digest the cellulose in wood.
Another name you might consider is Ruminant. Ruminants are hoofed mammals like Bison or Goats that manage to digest the cellulose in grass in part by regurgitating and re-chewing it at length.