ELi5: How do some animals get enough nutrients out of eating hay or grass or a single variety of leaf for their entire lives?
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When you look really really close at the stuff animals need to live it starts to work a lot like Lego. Animals generally need a similar set of different models to work, like everyone needs a yellow car, a red car, and a red house etc. Some animals evolved to try to eat a wide variety of food so that they can just consume those models already assembled and use them as they are. Other animals eat lots of the same food and take in a smaller number of ready assembled models but then their body breaks those models down into their bricks and uses those to build the models they are missing. Maybe you only eat red and yellow cars but you can break up some of the red cars to make the red houses you aren’t getting ready made in your food.
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