how do cactuses break down food?
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Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, some bacteria, and some protistans use the energy from sunlight to produce sugar, which cellular respiration converts into ATP, the "fuel" used by all living things. The conversion of unusable sunlight energy into usable chemical energy, is associated with the actions of the green pigment chlorophyll. Most of the time, the photosynthetic process uses water and releases the oxygen that we absolutely must have to stay alive. Oh yes, we need the food as well!
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the food you eat has a large variety of chemical features, so you need a lot of different enzymes to break down all the different types of chemical structures that your food contains so your body can effectively process it.
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By the gizzard. It purposely swallows small pebbles to aid in crushing grains, corn, seed, plant material bfore pass down to the stomach
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Think of whales. They have that siv-like stuff that strains krill and plankton stuff out of the water, to be swallowed and digested later.\n\nOk, now for a smarter explination: \n\nWhen humans eat, there's a lot more methods and reasons behind digestion than simply mechanical breakdown.\nFood starts in the mouth, where salivary amylaze, an enyzme, begins to break down starch. The mechanical process increases the surface area of the food, allowing a more rapid breakdown. Peristalsis moves food along the digestive track, partially digesting and absorbing along the way. In the stomach, chemicals from the gallbladder and pancreas are secreted to further breakdown food (with stomach fluid, "acid chyme"), and specifically protein (by enzyme "pepsin," thus the antacid medicine). This is known as "chemical digestion." Stomach muscles also aid in mixing digestive enzymes; this is what happens when your stomach lurches, bubbles (but gas can cause this also), "talks," or churns. Next, as food travels to the small and then large intestine, fat in food is absorbed in the small and water in the large.\n\nSpecies vary in the ammount of breakdown needed for their body to absorb nutrients. This describes the function of most. On the whole, animals besides humans use teeth to intimidate predators and capture prey. Some snakes swallow eggs whole, and would use teeth only to defend against the mother bird. The venus fly-trap captures flies and then disables them without teeth. Spiders don't have teeth, persay, but poisonous fangs which disable their prey--you may recall that they merely "suck" the liquids out of their food. \nAnimals equipped with other mechanisms besides teeth to capture prey have no need for them to digest.
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keep them in a ventilated container, not in direct sunlight or they will get cooked.\n\nif you know what plant they were feeding on, collect fresh leaves for them every day or keep extras in the fridge.\n\nif your not sure what plant they were eating, give them a couple of differant types and they will show you what they like by devouring it.\n\ndon't feed them what crickets would eat as they are quite different, crickets are nocturnal and live underground or in crevices, grasshoppers feed in the day and live above ground
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The process of making food in a plant from the sun's energy
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Grasses feed on mineral salts, carbon, and water from soil\nmosses have a kind of mix physiology allowing them to feed on non-organig substratum, and to keep water stored for a very long time span- yet not fully able to feed on their own\ncockroaches are able to eat any kind of organic matter left by other animals -including the snaps of that chestnut pie left on the table.\nbees use mainly sugar from plants and use a lot of energy to collect it within a highly organized system
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plants use the sunlight to turn nutrients into sugars to feed the plant they also take the toxins away from the plant when they go brown and drop off. Carbon dioxide and oxygen are released from them.
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they eat part or the whole the crop
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They are plants or animals  , usually a bacterium or fungus, that breaks down the cells of dead plants and animals into simpler substances.
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The exact same way it does a carrot, cookie, cheese... and everything else you eat.\n\n\n\nIn humans, digestion begins in the mouth where food is chewed with the teeth. The process stimulates exocrine glands in the mouth to release digestive enzymes such as salivary amylase, which aid in the breakdown of food, particularly carbohydrates. Chewing also causes the release of saliva, which helps condense food into a bolus that can be easily passed through the esophagus. The esophagus is about 20 centimeters long. The food is pushed down by a movement called peristalsis, which is the wave-like contraction of smooth muscle tissue characteristic of the Digestive system.\n\nThe food then goes to the stomach when it passes through the cardiac sphincter. In the stomach, food is churned and thoroughly mixed with hydrochloric acid and other digestive enzymes with digestive fluid to further decompose it chemically for a few hours. As the acidic level changes in the stomach and later parts of the digestive tract, more enzymes are activated or deactivated to extract and process various nutrients.\n\nAfter being processed in the stomach, food is passed to the small intestine via peristalsis. It passes through the pyloric sphincter and enters the first 10 inches of the small intestine, the duodenum, where it is further mixed with 3 different liquids, which are bile (which helps aid in fat digestion), pancreatic juice (made by the pancreas), and intestinal juice. They also add several enzymes: maltase, lactase and sucrase, to process sugars. (Bile also contains pigments that are by-products of red blood cell destruction in the liver; these bile pigments are eliminated from the body with the feces.) Most nutrient absorption takes place in the small intestine. The nutrients goes through the small intestine's wall (small, finger-like structure, that is called villi). The blood, which has absorbed nutrients, is carried away from the small intestine via the hepatic portal vein and goes to the liver for filtering, removal of toxins and help processing of nutrients.\n\nAfter going through the small intestine, the food then goes to the large intestine. The large intestine has 3 parts: the cecum (or pouch that forms the T-junction with the small intestine), the colon, and the rectum. In the large intestine, water is reabsorbed, and the foods that cannot go thorugh the villi such as fiber, can be stored in large intestine. Fiber helps to keep the food moving through the G.I. tract. The food that cannot be broken down is called feces. Feces is stored in the rectum until it is expelled through the anus
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Since this is in biology, you could be talking about food energy.  Here's how that goes:\nEvery time an animal eats a plant, only 10% of the energy in the plant is passed on to another animal that eats that animal.  So, if you eat, say, a cow, you are only getting 10% of the energy that you would be getting by eating the plant in the first place.
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The energy that carnivores obtain from their diet is the chemical energy of molecules in the food.  As they metabolize (oxidize) food molecules, energy is released which is trapped and temporarily stored in the form of ATP molecules.\n\nPlants, on the other hand, absorb light.  The chlorophyll and other pigment molecules in the chloroplasts absorb light, and through the processes in chloroplasts, they are able to use that light energy to produce ATP and to produce electrons that are then available for use by the cell.
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Grass grows.  Grazing animals (herbivores) eat grass and convert it to flesh.  Meat eating animals (carnivores) catch and eat herbivores.  Carnivores die.  Bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms cause decay.  The decay products help fertilse the grass so it can grow, and the process repeats.\n\nIt is a little more complicated than that, but the  basics are as set out above.
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Cactus, you only have to give it water once for the whole winter.\n\nI give mine water in November then I don't give water again until February.
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It is probably because of the HydroChloric Acid (HCL) in it that breaks down the food.  Maybe some type of upholstry cleaner with acid neutralizer in it would help.
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Bacteria are involved in decomposition, fixing Nitrates into the soil and digesting plant matter in the guts of herbivorous animals, for starters. Without this crops wouldn't grow, animals couldn't eat them and dead bodies wouldn't break down.