Ruminants are, without exception, obligate herbivores subsisting as they do on a diet composed entirely of plant material. However, plant material is a diverse resource and within the Ruminantia there is a range of feeding niches with different herbivore classes focussing their foraging effort on different vegetation types (Hofmann 1989). The plant material available to herbivores comes in a range of morphological types with the major types being grasses, forbs, and browse. Grasses (including the morphologically similar sedges) are monocotyledonous plants characterised by a basal meristem, a low growth form and a relative lack of lignified support structures (except for some of the tall tropical grasses which could be considered to be morphologically classed as browse).
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Duncan, A.J., Poppi, D.P. (2008). Nutritional Ecology of Grazing and Browsing Ruminants. In: Gordon, I.J., Prins, H.H.T. (eds) The Ecology of Browsing and Grazing. Ecological Studies, vol 195. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72422-3_4
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