What characteristic of the aardvark's diet creates a unique challenge for captive management in zoos?

Answer

The difficulty in replicating its hyper-specialized diet of ants and termites with formulated feeds.

Maintaining an aardvark in a captive environment poses specific challenges because their entire digestive and metabolic system is geared toward processing the chitin and specific proteins found exclusively in ants and termites. Zoos must exert significant effort to replicate this hyper-specialized diet, often requiring specialized insectivore chow supplemented with nutrient-rich pastes or live insects. While some captive management might introduce carefully calibrated omnivorous supplements like commercial carnivore biscuits, fruits, and vegetables to cover all nutritional bases when natural sources are scarce, the fundamental difficulty lies in mimicking the nutritional profile of its natural insect prey.

What characteristic of the aardvark's diet creates a unique challenge for captive management in zoos?

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