The Camels Life

A female camel carries a single young, called a calf, inside her body for about 13 months before giving birth. The calf's eyes are open at birth, and a thick, woolly coat covers its body. The calf can run when it is only a few hours old, and it calls to its mother with a soft "baa" somewhat like that of a lamb. The young camel and its mother live together for several years unless they are forcibly kept apart.
When a calf is about a year old, its owner begins to teach it to stand and kneel on command. The young camel also learns to carry a saddle or small, light packs. The size and weight of the packs are gradually increased as the camel grows older. A 5-year-old camel can carry a full load.
Camels can go for days or even weeks with little or no food or water. Desert people feed their camels dates, grass, and such grains as wheat and oats. In zoos, the animals eat hay and dry grains--about 3.5 kilograms of each every day. When a camel travels across the desert, food may be hard to find. The animal may have to live on dried leaves, seeds, and whatever desert plants it can find. A camel can eat a thorny twig without hurting its mouth. The lining of the mouth is so tough that the sharp thorns cannot push through the skin. If food is very scarce, a camel will eat anything--bones, fish, meat, leather, and even its owner's tent.
A camel does not chew its food well before swallowing it. The animal's stomach has three sections, one of which stores the poorly chewed food. This food, or cud, is later returned to the mouth in a ball-like glob, and the camel chews it. The chewed food is then swallowed and goes to the other parts of the stomach to be completely digested. Camels, deer, cattle, and other kinds of animals that digest their food in this way are called ruminants.
A camel can go without water for days or even months. The amount of water a camel drinks varies with the time of year and with the weather. Camels need less water in winter when the weather is cool and the plants they eat contain more moisture than in summer. Camels that graze in the Sahara can go all winter without water and may refuse to drink if water is offered to them. But a large, thirsty camel can drink as much as 200 litres a day. This water is not stored in the camel's body but replaces water previously used up.
A camel needs little water each day because it gets some moisture from its food. Also, it keeps most of the water that is in its body. Most animals sweat when hot, and the evaporation of the water from their skin keeps them cool. But camels do not sweat much. Instead, their body temperature rises by as much as 6 Celsius degrees during the heat of the day and then cools down at night. In people, an increase of only one or two degrees is a sign of illness.
On extremely hot days, a camel keeps as cool as possible by resting rather than feeding. It may lie down in a shady place or face the sun so that only a small part of its body receives the sun's rays. A group of camels may fight off heat by pressing against each other, because the body temperatures of the camels may be lower than the air temperature

History of Camels

Wild camels first originated in North America, and then, before the last Ice Age, they spread from there to East Asia and then across to Afghanistan and Iran and Arabia (and also south to South America where they became llamas and vicunas and alpacas). They became extinct in North America, maybe during the Ice Age.
Camels were domesticated (tamed) long after cows and sheep, maybe about the same time as horses (about 3000 BC). Like horses, they are not as tame and stupid as cows and sheep are.
This camel is from India.
By the time of the Islamic Empire, there were almost no wild camels (and there still aren't), but people used tame camels all across Africa and Asia, from China to North Africa.
Camels can travel long distances across the desert without needing water, so they were very useful in the Gobi Desert in Asia and in the Sahara Desert in Africa.
But it took a long time to figure out a good pack saddle for camels, so they could carry heavy loads. Because of not having good pack saddles, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans used donkeys more than camels even in the desert. (For instance, when Jesus entered Jerusalem, he rode on a donkey). But around the beginning of the Islamic empire, maybe about 500 AD, somebody in West Asia invented a good pack saddle for camels. After that, people began to use camels as pack animals more and more.
In Africa, beginning around 1000 AD, camels made it possible to cross the Sahara desert, so people could trade between West Africa and North Africa. This started great trade routes which continued to be used up to 1500 AD and later.

The camel is a large, strong desert animal. Camels can travel great distances across hot, dry deserts with little food or water. They walk easily on soft sand where trucks would get stuck, and carry people and heavy loads to places that have no roads. Camels also serve the people of the desert in many other ways.
The camel carries its own built-in food supply on its back in the form of a hump. The hump is a large lump of fat that provides energy if food is hard to find.
There are two chief kinds of camels: (1) the Arabian camel, also called dromedary, which has one hump, and (2) the Bactrian camel, which has two humps. In the past, hybrids (crossbreeds) of the two species were used widely in Asia. These hybrid camels had one extra-long hump and were larger and stronger than either of their parents.
Camels have been domestic animals for thousands of years. Arabian camels may once have lived wild in Arabia, but none of them live in the wild today. There are several million Arabian camels, and most of them live with the desert people of Africa and Asia. The first Bactrian camels probably lived in Mongolia and in Turkestan, which was called Bactria in ancient times. A few hundred wild Bactrian camels may still roam in some parts of Mongolia, and over a million domesticated ones live in Asia.
Scientists believe that members of the camel family lived in North America at least 40 million years ago. Before the Ice Age, camels had developed into a distinct species and had moved westward across Alaska to western Asia. In Asia, two groups separated and gradually became the two chief kinds of camels known today. Meanwhile, smaller members of the camel family had moved southward from North to South America. Today, four members of the camel family live in South America: (1) alpacas, (2) guanacos, (3) llamas, and (4) vicunas. By the time Europeans went to North America, no members of the camel family had lived there for many thousands of years. No one knows why they disappeared.
The first dromedary (one-humped) camel was imported into Australia in 1840. This ill-fated animal took part in an expedition into the northern part of South Australia. It was destroyed after accidentally causing its owner's death. Later, large numbers of camels were imported into Australia for exploration and station work in the arid interior. About 250,000 camels still roam wild in the central Australian deserts.

camels eat

When many people all over the world think of Egypt, they think of the Pyramids with a graceful caravan of camels passing by them. It’s easy to imagine the caravans of the traders heading into the desert. With no food or water needed for the beasts of burden, we fancy that the journey was made easier. It is a romantic dream of many people to view such a caravan. The truth is, by far, stranger than the myths that have grown up around the camel, the beast of burden which helped spread wealth around the ancient world.

One of the most enduring and misunderstood myths about the camel is it's ability to go days without water. Myth tells us that the camel stores water in its hump. The truth is the hump, or humps in the case of the Bactrian camel, are a fatty deposit that provides energy when food is scarce.
When a camels energy reserves become low from lack of food, the hump shrinks and becomes soft and will actually flop over to one side. The resilient nature of the animal can be seen in the rapid return of the hump to its normal firm upright self after just a few days of good grazing.
The camel stores water in its blood stream, an interesting physiological process. The camel has developed, over the centuries, a unique water saving biology. Capable of losing forty percent of its body's weight before becoming distressed, it is able to go five to seven days before having to drink. The amount it drinks when water is available would cause severe problems in most animals, up to 21 gallons in about 10 minutes. If moisture-laden forage is available, a camel will not need as much water. The water it drinks can be too salty or brackish for other animals.

The camel's mouth, stomach, and teeth have all developed to allow it to eat plants that are not palatable to other desert animals. The camel's mouth is tough and rubbery so that thorns and branches won't damage it. The thirty-four sharp teeth allow it to bite off tough bites of almost anything, and when forage is short a camel can subsist on meats, skin and bones. Camels are ruminants, similar to cows, with three stomachs. They don't chew their food. They eat by swallowing their food whole and allowing it to be partially digested by the stomachs before being chewed as a cud later.