- Conversely, when animals are scarce, wolves will eat lots of blueberries.
https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-wolves-may-be-helping-...
- Same with bears. For instance, the grizzly (brown) bears in Denali National Park who are farther away from salmon breeding areas (coastal areas) tend to eat a lot more berries than their coastal counterparts.
- Once a horse gets a taste for baby chicks, it's hard to convince them they aren't omnivorous.
- Same here, first time I had balut in Vietnam it unlocked some kind of primal level in me I didn’t know I had.
- Is this just based on that one video or is there something more to this
- Its probably true of most animals. I raised a couple of pigs and we intentionally never fed them any meat, even though they'd probably eat it, because we didnt want them to get a taste for it
- For sure they'd eat it - pigs have a taste for everything.
You don't want to be the farmer who falls over in his pig sty.
- > You don't want to be the farmer who falls over in his pig sty.
This is the real reason for the panic when Dorothy falls into the pig sty at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. The pigs would crush her and eat her. (But in the movie, her dress doesn't even get dirty!)
- Related somewhat: ground squirrels in Bay Area park started actively started hunting voles.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/carnivorous-feeding-squ...
- A biologist with the surname “Wild.” That woman was meant to be in this field.
- Nominative determinism is the name of this phenomenon, for the curious.
- beat me to it
- Most Asian primates that I have encountered are omnivores, especially if you include insects and small reptiles/amphibians.
Is that not the case in Central/South America?
- > Among primatologists, bearded capuchins are famous for using stone tools to obtain food. They’ve been observed placing palm nuts on a hard surface and smashing them with rocks to reveal the tasty kernels inside. Wild females have also been seen using sticks or blades of grass to pick their noses and eat any boogers they extract.
why would eating boogers be a selective advantage? They eat each other's boogers as well? the wild males are never observed participating?
- Everything an animal does isn't a selective advantage, sometimes it's just not a disadvantage.
- Fine, in that case, why is it a disadvantage for the males?
Now please don't tell me "it doesn't have to be a disadvantage for males, it might just be an advantage for females" !
- FWIW, many birds eat other birds - not just raptors and carrion eaters. I just read the book "A Bird's IQ", which has many references to it.
- I suspect it is not just when fruit is scarce many if not most primates are omnivores. Fruit is likely easier than meat most of the time but meat contains dense nutrients. Macaques e.g crab eating macaques routinely eat meat.
- I was taught this in school thirty years ago. Is this not a known thing?
- there was a recent story about squirrels in rural California opportunistically hunting and eating field mice and vols that's due to an explosion the latters' population and high availability. Not driven by scarcity of default food sources.
- Ground squirrels, and the name is key. I haven't researched, but I know that often such animals eat small insects. And worms. Insects are meat, too.
So if there is a vole population explosion, and voles live underground, and are hungry, a ground squirrels den is going to get invaded, with the voles trying to steal food. And the ground squirrel will of course attack and kill intruders. Especially if they have young in that underground nest.
So it's not a far stretch for them to get used to the taste. I think they prefer nuts, because they can store nuts, but on that front they also eat berries and really anything they find, so storage isn't a diet limiter. And after killing a vole, why waste it?
- Obligatory Python sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deoNAOfkXxc&t=2s
My first, or original impression, which is why it stuck, was that they'd not been stranded for long, but without delay, begin considering who's on the menu. I am not sure why I remember it that way, so I will have to watch it again. Whether misinterpretation or not, it landed on me as a cathartic mockery of human metabolism, or, cannibalism.
- Eating other animals and being able to digest other animals can be two different things. Feels like that should have been a part of such an article.
- Eating animal is easy, mostly proteins and fat that are also in plants. The main difference I can think of now is that animals have glycogen instead of starch. Glycogen is more branchy than starch, but IIRC it's not so difficult to digest and there is not to much of it anyway.
The animals adapted to eat plants probably have a gut that is too long, so it will be less efficient, and I guess they have to remember to eat their vegetables to avoid problems.
The reverse is harder. An animal adapted to eat mostly animals have a short gut and will not extract all the nutrients from the plants. Also, plants have cellulose that is super hard to digest, so some animals have special parts of the digestive tube to let the food wait and be partially digested by friendly bacteria. (Yes it's gross, unless you think it's almost like free beer.)
- Would they spend the energy if there wasn't any gain to it?
- Eliminating competition?
- killing without eating will eliminate them too
- If you kill because you are hungry, it seems logical you would eat your prey. If your prey doesn't actually provide nutrients, but killing them eliminates competition to nutrients, the behavior would be evolutionarily beneficial, even if not maximally efficient.
- I don't feel like the article is lacking for that. It's evolution at work. There could be monkeys eating animals that can properly digest them due to some mutation or unique gut biomes. Actually eating the animals is an important first step. Monkeys that usually eat fruits are hunting and eating animals when food is scarce, that's an article worthy observation.
