Every meal takes a method. Cheetahs eat gazelles and other small and medium-sized hoofed animals. A cheetah gets within about 100 yards of its prey and then sprints, and a full sprint lasts about 20 seconds. Lions hunt as a team because many of their prey animals are faster than they are, and lionesses are the main hunters in a lion pride. Wolves hunt in packs, which lets them bring down large animals such as elk and moose. A wolf can eat up to about 20 pounds of meat at one meal. Red foxes eat both animals and plants, so they are omnivores.

Now for the python and the owl. A python waits for food to come close, and then it grabs its prey, squeezes with its coils, and swallows it whole, usually head first. Owls swallow their prey whole, too, and many owls hunt at night. Later they cough up pellets of bones and fur that they cannot digest.

Plant food takes more work than it looks. A giant panda spends about half of each day eating bamboo, and it crushes the tough bamboo with strong jaws and flat back teeth. A cow chews its cud, which is food that comes back up from the stomach to be chewed again. A cow's stomach has several chambers, including one called the rumen, and tiny living things called microbes in the rumen break down the grass a cow eats. Giraffes are ruminants with a four-compartment stomach, and they chew cud, too, so they can chew while they walk. A giraffe's very long tongue reaches around thorns.

Big eaters need a lot of food. A baleen whale has fringed baleen plates instead of teeth, and baleen is made of keratin, the same material as human hair and fingernails. Blue whales eat tiny animals called krill. A blue whale gulps a huge mouthful of water and pushes it out through the baleen, leaving the krill behind, and it can eat several tons of krill in a day. An elephant eats plants such as grass, leaves, bark, roots and fruit, spends most of the day eating, and can eat hundreds of pounds of food in a day.

All these meals link up. A food chain shows who eats whom. Plants are producers: they make their own food from sunlight. Many different food chains that overlap make up a food web. Tiny floating algae called phytoplankton are the base of most ocean food webs, and many large predators in the Southern Ocean, blue whales among them, rely on krill. Decomposers eat dead plants and animals and return nutrients to the soil.

Words to know

• sprints: runs very fast
• baleen: whale's strainer plates
• phytoplankton: tiny floating algae
• pellets: coughed-up bones, fur
• microbes: tiny living things