Caractéristiques du régime alimentaire de Marmota bobac. Diet characteristic of Marmota bobac.

Résumé

The food selectivity in M. bobac while feeding on green grasses, even in a cage gives a gain in energy of 115-190 kJ per 100 g of dry substance of forage.Succulent plants from the families Fabaceae and Asteraceae are the preferable green forage of bobac. To assess the consumption dependance on the body mass (age) of animals we expressed the daily food consumption of each individual in terms of relative values (%) assuming for each kind of food the specific consumption (g per l kg of body mass) of an adult animal weighing 4 kg as 100% (the relative specific consumption). This permitted to eliminate the fluctuations of absolute values of specific consumption pertinent to different kinds of food. The calculations showed that the dry substance consumption depend on the body mass of adult M. bobac can be expressed by an equation of regression: y= 207.4 -25.2 x (r=-0.7l, p=0.05) where x is the body mass of animal in kg and y is the relative (%) food consumption. In yearlings: y= 320.8 - 64.2 X (r=-0.827, p=0.05). This difference has a tendency to diminish when the young animal body mass approaches that of the adults.