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When fruit is scarce, these monkeys hunt animals
- morpheos137 17d agoI 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.
- kleton 17d agoOnce a horse gets a taste for baby chicks, it's hard to convince them they aren't omnivorous.
- thriving_earthw 17d agoIs this just based on that one video or is there something more to this
- kryogen1c 17d agoIts 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
- HarHarVeryFunny 17d agoFor 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.
- heresie-dabord 17d ago> 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!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6cF5lyqEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6cF5lyqEo
- tdeck 16d agoFinally a time when this obscure Wikipedia article is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet
- HarHarVeryFunny 16d agoApparently it's still a thing in places like rural India for people to squat to poop out in the fields, and then risk being bowled over by a pig rushing over to eat it. They truly will eat anything. As far as meat goes, they are not just scavengers - I've seen videos of wild pigs chasing after rabbits, actively hunting them down. I'd never head of those Chinese "pig toilets", but it reminds me of a Chinese friend who said that growing up (maybe still?) it was common practice in the villages to feed infant poop to the pet/village dogs.
- kryogen1c 16d agoYup. Lots of stories of old timers dying of a heart attack in the pen and only finding glasses and watches left.
- groestl 17d agoWhen cows have phosphorus deficiency, they occasionally eat small birds, rodents, insects, or bones
- kleton 17d agoIt's not uncommon for cows to get a taste for chicken eggs and start seeking them out
- hammock 17d agoSame here, first time I had balut in Vietnam it unlocked some kind of primal level in me I didn’t know I had.
- metalman 16d agoHorses are clearly and very much into the whole cowboy thing, they LIKE chasing down cows and catching them, some do it all by themseves and catch cows by grabbing there tails and hauling them around that way. Horses are panoptic motherfuckers and are startlingly good stalkers, which I learned living in close quarters with a horse needing to chase them away while doing stuff in the padock, but have them reapear, it took very precise sneeky peeking to catch them moving towards me, as they only move when I am not looking, which led me to the only viable deterance, which is to pretend that they are invisible/of zero importance which un nerves them, but so much as one eyelash of a look at them is taken as an invitation to partisipate, fuckers. Horses also work well with dogs, and for arabians in Arabia, dates and dried fish were used as feed for both. note, live with an arab/percheron cross far enough out that there is a wide representation of wild critters, and most everything is on most everythings menue, depending. And one of my more radicle, radicle friends would say, "we will eat the vegans first, they are slow and weak", refering to what to do durring an opocaliptic event, and until they could get out to my place in the country.
- IAmBroom 15d ago> And one of my more radicle, radicle friends would say, "we will eat the vegans first, they are slow and weak"... A radicle is an early plant growth stage. No wonder they would hate the vegans most!
- DarmokTanagra 17d agoMost 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?
- lxe 17d agoRelated somewhat: ground squirrels in Bay Area park started actively started hunting voles. https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/carnivorous-feeding-squirrels-documented-california https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/carnivorous-feeding-squ...
- Revanche1367 17d agoA biologist with the surname “Wild.” That woman was meant to be in this field.
- kulahan 17d agoNominative determinism is the name of this phenomenon, for the curious.
- fitsumbelay 17d agobeat me to it
- hinkley 17d agoI was taught this in school thirty years ago. Is this not a known thing?
- sandeepkd 17d agoEating 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.
- 0xd00d00 17d agoWould they spend the energy if there wasn't any gain to it?
- Zambyte 17d agoEliminating competition?
- fhn 17d agokilling without eating will eliminate them too
- Zambyte 17d agoIf 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.
- pull_my_finger 17d agoI 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.
- gus_massa 17d agoEating 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.)
- strictnein 17d agoConversely, when animals are scarce, wolves will eat lots of blueberries. https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-wolves-may-be-helping-wild-blueberries-spread/601882372 https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-wolves-may-be-helping-...
- fitsumbelay 17d ago[flagged]
- mykowebhn 17d agoSame 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.
- IAmBroom 15d agoA wild animal documentary that I saw mentioned that stags would eat their own bloodied velvet hangings that were scratched off on branches ("velvet" is the living covering of the antlers at the beginning of the growing season). It claimed "biologists don't know why the deer, which are herbivores, eat the bloody remains." Which is stupid, of course. The answer is because deer can't read, so they don't know they are "herbivores".
- fitsumbelay 17d agothere 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.
- b112 17d agoGround 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?
- wocram 17d agoWhat does this say about humans?
- fhn 17d agothat we are animals?
- eth0up 17d agoObligatory Python sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deoNAOfkXxc&t=2s 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.
- HarHarVeryFunny 17d agoFWIW, 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.
- DoctorOetker 17d ago> 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?
- notRobot 17d agoEverything an animal does isn't a selective advantage, sometimes it's just not a disadvantage.
- DoctorOetker 17d agoFine, 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" !
- notRobot 16d ago> why is it a disadvantage for the males? Who said it was? Just because males don't exhibit a behaviour doesn't mean it's necessarily a disadvantage.
- notRobot 16d ago> why is it a disadvantage for the males? Who said it was? Just because males don't exhibit a behaviour doesn't mean it's necessarily an evolutionary disadvantage.
- DoctorOetker 16d agohow do you explain the females do and the males don't? that sounds like a systematic occurrence