The front horn is the largest at about 50cm long, but some have reached up to 140cm.īlack rhinos, white rhinos, it doesn’t matter. The black, white and Sumatran rhino has two horns. Black rhino can be very aggressive and will charge at anything that scares them.Īn adult black rhino weighs between 8 kilograms. They eat leafy plants, branches, shoots, bushes and fruit. Black rhinos are the third biggest of the five types of rhino.As the saying goes, rhinos do have thick skin, but they can still get sun burnt.Black rhinos have a ‘prehensile’, meaning hooked, lip for pulling leaves off branches.‘Rhino’ means ‘nose’ and ‘ceros’ means ‘horn’. The biggest danger to rhinos is poaching, or being killed for their horn. You can find out more about how we’re helping black rhino conservation and find out about our new baby boy born in January 2020. The Eastern black rhino is seriously at risk of becoming extinct. They love rolling in the mud and charging around. They live in our Kifaru Reserve enclosure. They usually live between 35 and 50 years, and most black rhinos live in East Africa, in Tanzania. They also have a strong sense of smell and this is what they use most to make sense of what’s around them. They can swivel their cone shaped ears to pick up on the tiniest of sounds. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1997.Black rhinos have bad eyesight but they have excellent hearing. A Neotropical Companion: an introduction to the animals, plants, and ecosystems of the New World tropics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Females are lighter but can be slightly longer. As an adult it feeds on fruit and sap.Īdults weigh between 18 and 28 g. In its younger stages this insect digests decaying wood. Unfortunately, because many parts of tropical lowlands have been deforested, or at least overcut, the rhinoceros beetle is rare and struggling to survive. This is why Megasoma elephas populations can only live in forest mature enough to have a sufficient number of large, fallen trees. Since trees in the Tropics decay very quickly and the grubs develop slowly, the grubs will become exposed or run out of food unless they are in a large fallen tree. In the grub, or larval stage, the beetle munches on decaying wood on the inside of a fallen tree. The entire lifespan of the rhinoceros beetle is 3 to 4 years, but approximately 2 of those years are spent as a grub. These large, impressive beetles come from humble means. Males fight over females and feeding sites, but they are not very aggressive otherwise. They grapple with their horns, and the winner is whoever first lifts his opponent off his feet and knocks him over. Two males will approach each other to compete, often in a tree. The hercules beetle (Dynastes hercules) takes second in size compared to the rhinoceros, and the hercules has a second long horn curving down towards the lower one. This rhinoceros can fly short distances, although its heavy body makes it rather ungraceful in flight. The light to dark brown rhinoceros beetle can look almost velvety because it has fine, short hairs over the exoskeleton. Females are smaller and do not have such a dramatically adorned head. He has additional, shorter horns that project out from his head, but the long one is used for fighting. The male is unmistakable with his massive size and long, intimidating horn that curves up. The rhino is one of the strongest insects in the world with relation to its body size, and is the largest beetle within countries like Costa Rica. The rhinoceros beetle can be found from southern Mexico down to northern Colombia and northern Venezuela. In younger stages, it lives inside large fallen trees. Lowland rainforest is suitable for this beetle, but mature forest is required for the beetle to survive.
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