question: How do large herbivores (e.g. moose and horses) grow so large and powerful despite eating exclusively plants and fruit?
comment: They have the proper enzymes and gut bacteria to digest the plant matter and extract or create the proteins and other things they need. They also eat most of the day.
passages: Section::::Biology and ecology.:Diet and foraging.
  
  Most megabats are primarily frugivorous, meaning that they mostly consume fruit. Throughout the family, a diverse array of fruit is consumed from nearly 188 plant genera. Some species are also nectarivorous, meaning that they also drink nectar from flowers. In Australia, "Eucalyptus" flowers are an especially important food source. Other food resources include leaves, shoots, buds, pollen, seed pods, sap, cones, bark, and twigs. They are prodigious eaters and can consume up to 2.5 times their own body weight in fruit per night.
  
  Section::::Biology and ecology.:Diet and foraging.:Seed dispersal.
   Civets are unusual among feliforms, and carnivora in general, in that they are omnivores or even herbivores. Many species primarily eat fruit. Some also use flower nectar as a major source of energy.
  
  Section::::Diet.:Coffee.
   Similar to white-tailed deer in North America, roe deer in European locations have shown increases in abundance even in the face of already extremely high densities. The deer are able to irrupt and continue to increase in density over their carrying capacity because in particular areas especially, populations show delayed response to density dependent factors. The mammal species that exhibit Malthusian growth are the ones that, under certain conditions, act more like r-strategists than K-strategists compared to surrounding populations.
   Section::::Physiology.:Thermoregulation.:Metabolism.
  
  Common ostriches are able to attain their necessary energetic requirements via the oxidation of absorbed nutrients. Much of the metabolic rate in animals is dependent upon their allometry, the relationship between body size to shape, anatomy, physiology and behavior of an animal. Hence, it is plausible to state that metabolic rate in animals with larger masses is greater than animals with a smaller mass.
   seeds. Sifakas are naturally suited for this herbivorous diet because they have long gastrointestinal tracts and enlarged cecums. Groups of sifaka do not show any aggression towards other groups when feeding, let alone come into contact with each other.
  
  Sifakas in general show seasonal variation in diet. During the wet season, Perrier's sifakas contribute most of their feeding time, about 70 to 90 percent of it, to fruits and seeds, but in the dry season most of the species feeding time is spent on leaves and flowers.
  
  Section::::Behavior.
   Lutungs are herbivores, primarily eating leaves, fruits, and buds. To digest the tough leaves, they developed a multichambered stomach.
  
  Section::::Reproduction.
   The diets of most subfossil lemurs, most notably "Palaeopropithecus" and "Megaladapis", consisted primarily of C plants, which use a form of photosynthesis that results in higher water loss through transpiration. Other subfossil lemurs, such as "Hadropithecus" and "Mesopropithecus", fed on CAM and C plants, which use more water-efficient forms of photosynthesis. Fruit and animal matter was more common in the diets of subfossil lemurs including "Pachylemur", "Archaeolemur", and the giant aye-aye. In southern and southwestern Madagascar, the subfossil lemurs of the spiny forests generally favored the C plants over the more abundant CAM plants, although closely related sympatric species may have fed upon the two types of plants in different ratios, allowing each to divide resources and coexist. Since plants produce defenses against leaf-eating animals, the extensive use of spines by plants in the spiny forests suggest that they evolved to cope with leaf-eating lemurs, large and small.
   Section::::Prey.:Ungulates.:Sheep, goats, and pigs.
   The moose is a herbivore and is capable of consuming many types of plant or fruit. The average adult moose needs to consume per day to maintain its body weight. Much of a moose's energy is derived from terrestrial vegetation, mainly consisting of forbs and other non-grasses, and fresh shoots from trees such as willow and birch. These plants are rather low in sodium, and moose generally need to consume a good quantity of aquatic plants. While much lower in energy, aquatic plants provide the moose with its sodium requirements, and as much as half of their diet usually consists of aquatic plant life. In winter, moose are often drawn to roadways, to lick salt that is used as a snow and ice melter. A typical moose, weighing , can eat up to of food per day.
   In effect, this would indicate that a herbivore in a dense forest would spend more time handling (eating) the vegetation because there was so much vegetation around than a herbivore in a sparse forest, who could easily browse through the forest vegetation. According to the Holling's disk equation, a herbivore in the sparse forest would be more efficient at eating than the herbivore in the dense forest
   The upland moa was herbivorous, its diet extrapolated from fossilised stomach contents, droppings, and the structure of its beak and crop. It ate leaves and small twigs, using its beak to "shear[…]with scissor-like moves". Its food required grinding before it could be digested, as indicated by its large crop. A 2004 study of the upland moa's coprolite provided evidence that branchlets of trees such as "Nothofagus", various lake-edge herbs, and tussock made up part of its diet.
   It is worth noting, however, that of the animals demonstrating the highest EQ's (see associated table), many are primarily frugivores, including apes, macaques, and proboscideans. This dietary categorization is significant to inferring the pressures which drive higher EQ’s. Specifically, frugivores must utilize a complex, trichromatic, map of visual space to locate and pick ripe fruits, and are able to provide for the high energetic demands of increased brain mass.
   Section::::Frugivore adaptations for fruit consumption.
  
  In order for frugivores to be good seed dispersers, they must digest fruits without consuming a high proportion of the seeds. Many seed-dispersing animals have specialized digestive systems to process fruits, which leave seeds intact. Some bird species have shorter intestines to rapidly pass seeds from fruits, while some frugivorous bat species have longer intestines. Some seed-dispersing frugivores have short gut-retention times, and others can alter intestinal enzyme composition when eating different types of fruits.
  
  Section::::Plant mechanisms to delay or deter frugivory.
   There are more than 7,800 species of squamate reptiles living today and approximately 2% of them are herbivorous, though the number is continually increasing). Herbivorous squamates are known from all major groups, including varanids. Less than two decades ago it was believed that there were no herbivorous Anguinomorpha (the clade that includes monitor lizards and possibly snakes;), but recent researched has demonstrated that the species "Varanus mabitang" was a strict herbivore and its sister species, "Varanus olivaceus", may be an omnivore. Additionally, a new giant (2 m in length) varanid ("Varanus bitatawa") may also solely consume fruit, though a thorough examination of its dietary ecology has not been conducted.
   The diet of the herbivorous varanid, "Varanus mabitang", is composed of fruits from palms augmented by the seeds of screw palms and figs. Many herbivorous lizards will eat insects in captivity. For example, the desert iguana ("Dipsosaurus dorsalis") consistently eats mealworms in zoos, whereas in the wild its diet consists of solely plants. The desert iguana also provides an excellent example of seasonal diet changes in herbivorous reptiles. Flowers from the creosote bush make up its diet in the springtime, whereas after the month of May the diet is made up of a more diverse range of plant material.
   Large mammalian carnivores are often absent on islands because of insufficient range or difficulties in over-water dispersal. In their absence, the ecological niches for large predators may be occupied by birds, reptiles or smaller carnivorans, which can then grow to larger-than-normal size. For example, on prehistoric Gargano Island in the Miocene-Pliocene Mediterranean, on islands in the Caribbean like Cuba, and on Madagascar and New Zealand, some or all apex predators were birds like eagles, falcons and owls, including some of the largest known examples of these groups. However, birds and reptiles generally make less efficient large predators than advanced carnivorans.
   Section::::Husbandry.:Feeding.
  
  Animals used as livestock are predominantly herbivorous, the main exception being the pig which is an omnivore. The herbivores can be divided into "concentrate selectors" which selectively feed on seeds, fruits and highly nutritious young foliage, "grazers" which mainly feed on grass, and "intermediate feeders" which choose their diet from the whole range of available plant material. Cattle, sheep, goats, deer and antelopes are ruminants; they digest food in two steps, chewing and swallowing in the normal way, and then regurgitating the semidigested cud to chew it again and thus extract the maximum possible food value.
   Occasionally, it is found that animals historically classified as carnivorous may deliberately eat plant material. For example, in 2013, it was considered that American alligators ("Alligator mississippiensis") may be physiologically omnivorous once investigations had been conducted on why they occasionally eat fruits. It was suggested that alligators probably ate fruits both accidentally but also deliberately.
   The Milne-Edwards's sifaka's diet is composed primarily of both mature and immature leaves and seeds, but they also regularly consume flowers and fruit. They also supplement their diet with soil and subterranean fungus. In the process of foraging, the Milne-Edwards' sifakas range an average of per day.
  
  Section::::Behavior.:Social organization.
   At least 90 per cent of the diet is mammalian; the usual prey taken by populations shows pronounced regional differences. Throughout its range the principal prey items are small ungulates (such as duikers, chevrotains), rock hyrax and small primates such as monkeys. Birds and large lizards are barely taken.
   Section::::Host manipulation.:Herbivore use of plant chemicals.
   Section::::Carnivory.
  
  "Nepenthes ampullaria" has largely moved away from carnivory and acquires a substantial portion of its nutrients from digesting leaf matter that falls to the forest floor. It is thus partially detritivorous.
  
  The species has developed several unique traits as a consequence of its adaptation to trapping leaf litter:
  
  BULLET::::- It is one of the few species in the genus to lack "lunate" cells in its pitchers. These are modified stomatal guard cells which, it is thought, deny prey a foothold in the pitcher.
   The mountain gorilla is primarily a herbivore; the majority of its diet is composed of the leaves, shoots and stems (85.8%) of 142 plant species. It also feeds on bark (6.9%), roots (3.3%), flowers (2.3%), and fruit (1.7%), as well as small invertebrates. (0.1%). Adult males can eat up to of vegetation a day, while a female can eat as much as .
   Section::::Effects of resource levels on tolerance.
   Lemur diets are highly variable and demonstrate a high degree of plasticity, although general trends suggest that the smallest species primarily consume fruit and insects (omnivory), while the larger species are more herbivorous, consuming mostly plant material. As with all primates, hungry lemurs might eat anything that is edible, whether or not the item is one of their preferred foods. For instance, the ring-tailed lemur eats insects and small vertebrates when necessary and as a result it is commonly viewed as an opportunistic omnivore. Coquerel's giant mouse lemur ("Mirza coquereli") is mostly frugivorous, but will consume insect secretions during the dry season.
  
presuppositions: If large herbivores only eat plants and fruit, they should not be able to grow as large as they are whilst only eating plants and fruit. 
corrections: Animals have proper enzymes to extract and create proteins from the food they consume. 
raw_presuppositions: If large herbivores only eat plants and fruit, they should not be able to grow as large as they are whilst only eating plants and fruit.  Herbivores should be small because they eat plants and fruit.
raw_corrections: Animals have proper enzymes to extract and create proteins from the food they consume.  They have the right enzymes to get a lot of nutrients out of the plants they do eat. And they eat all day long. 