Stenophagous

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Feeding on only a small number of specific food types, as certain insects or animals that eat a limited range of plants or prey
2. Having a restricted diet and consuming just a few particular kinds of food rather than a wide variety
3. Describing an organism that depends on a narrow selection of foods, often a single plant or prey species

Etymology: Stenophagous is a biologist's coinage built from two Greek elements: "steno", meaning narrow, and "-phagous", meaning eating or feeding on. The second part comes from the Greek "phagos", an eater, which is itself tied to the verb "phagein", to eat, and the Greek verb "ephagon", the past tense of the same root. Latin borrowed the ending as "-phagus", and English took it as "-phagous". The word describes an animal that feeds on only a narrow range of food, such as a koala that eats almost nothing but eucalyptus leaves or a moth caterpillar that eats one plant species. Its opposite, "eurypahgous" (eury-, broad), describes animals with varied diets. Ecologists use the pair to describe how specialized a feeding habit is, which is why the vocabulary matters: a single prefix turns a simple fact about dinner into a measure of how far a creature depends on one resource.

Antonyms: polyphagous, omnivorous