A carnivore ( ), meaning 'meat eater' (Latin carne meaning 'flesh' and vorare meaning 'to devour'), is an animal with a diet consisting mainly of meat, whether it comes from animals living (predation) or dead (scavenging).
In a more general sense, animals are loosely considered carnivores if their feeding behaviour consists of preying on other animals rather than grazing on plants. There are many predatory invertebrates, for example arthropods such as spiders or mantises and various species of predatory land snails and sea snails.
Animals that subsist on a diet consisting only of meat are referred to as obligate carnivores.
Plants that capture and digest insects are called carnivorous plants. Similarly fungi that capture microscopic animals are often called carnivorous fungi.
The designation "hypercarnivore" is used to decribe animals that exclusively feed on animal tissue. Additionally, it is used in paleobiology to describe taxa of animals which have an increased slicing component of their dentition relative to the grinding component.
The Carnivores games are a series of three first-person shooting video games released by Action Forms between 1998 and 2001, all for the PC. A fourth game, Carnivores Cityscape was developed by Sunstorm Interactive and released in 2002.
