What Do Rhinos Eat? Grazers, Browsers and Rhino Lips

Grazers and browsers

Plant-eating mammals are often divided into grazers, which eat grass close to the ground, and browsers, which eat the leaves, twigs and shoots of shrubs and trees. Rhinos include both. The two African species are a classic example: they often live in the same parks, yet they rarely compete for food because one eats grass and the other eats bushes.

What do white rhinos eat?

The white rhino is a specialist grazer. It has a long head held close to the ground and a wide, square upper lip that works like a lawnmower, cropping grass very short. It prefers short, nutritious grasses and spends long hours grazing in the morning, evening and at night, resting in the shade or wallowing in mud through the heat of the day.

Because so many white rhinos graze the same patches again and again, they create and maintain “grazing lawns” of short grass that are also used by antelopes and zebras. As the largest of the rhinos, often over two tonnes, a white rhino needs a great deal of grass, especially in the dry season when grass quality falls.

What do black rhinos eat?

The black rhino is a browser. Its pointed, prehensile upper lip can wrap around a branch and pull it into the mouth, where the cheek teeth snip through twigs as thick as a pencil or more. Black rhinos eat leaves, shoots, twigs, bark, herbs, legumes and fruit, and studies have recorded more than 200 plant species in their diet.

Many of these plants are well defended. Black rhinos happily eat thorny acacias and euphorbias with irritating milky sap that most other animals avoid. They eat little grass. In the dry season they often switch to whatever leafy plants are still available. The difference in lips is one of the easiest ways to tell the two African rhinos apart; see white rhino vs black rhino.

What do Asian rhinos eat?

The greater one-horned rhino (Indian rhino) of India and Nepal is mainly a grazer of tall grasslands and floodplains. It eats grasses, but also leaves, shrubs, fruit and aquatic plants, which it may feed on while standing in water. Its upper lip is semi-prehensile, able to grip tall grass stems and fold them into the mouth.

The Javan rhino and the Sumatran rhino live in dense tropical forest and are browsers. They feed on leaves, young shoots, twigs and fallen fruit, and push over or bend saplings to reach the leaves. Sumatran rhinos also visit natural salt licks to get minerals missing from their diet.

How rhinos digest their food

Rhinos are hindgut fermenters, like horses. Food passes through a simple stomach to a large intestine and cecum, where microbes break down the tough plant fibers. This system lets rhinos process large amounts of low-quality food quickly, but it extracts less nutrition from each mouthful than the four-chambered stomach of cattle or antelopes. The result is that rhinos must eat a great deal and spend much of their lives feeding.

African rhinos have no front teeth. They crop food with their lips and grind it with large cheek teeth. Asian rhinos still have incisors, and the greater one-horned rhino’s sharp lower incisors serve mainly as weapons in fights.

Water, wallows and middens

Rhinos usually drink once a day or every other day when water is close, often in the evening or at night. Black rhinos living in dry country can survive several days without drinking, getting some moisture from juicy plants such as euphorbias. Rhinos also wallow in mud, which cools them down and protects their skin from the sun and biting insects.

What goes in must come out. Rhinos deposit dung in shared piles called middens, which act as message boards: by smelling them, rhinos learn the age, sex and identity of others in the area. Rhinos also spread seeds in their dung. In Nepal and India, greater one-horned rhinos are important dispersers of some fruit trees, whose seeds sprout in the fertile middens.

Do rhinos ever eat anything other than plants?

No. Despite their size and fearsome horns, rhinos never hunt or eat meat. They may lick soil at mineral licks for salt, and calves drink their mother’s milk for well over a year, but adult rhinos live entirely on plants. Like hippos, elephants and other giant herbivores, they reach enormous sizes on a diet of vegetation alone.