eli5: Why are herbivorous animals usually fatter/bigger than carnivorous animals?
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I haven’t seen the actual correct answer on here yet so let me take a crack at it in ELI5 fashion. If you were stranded on a desert island with only some chicken and some grain, and you needed to survive as long as possible, what’s the best strategy. You have 3 choices:
1 Eat the grain, then when that runs out, eat the chickens.
2 eat the chicken, then eat the grain
3 feed the grain to the chicken to make the chicken stay fat while you only eat the chicken.
Now 3 is obviously the worst choice, because you’re now keeping alive yourself and chickens which takes a ton of energy (food) which is a limited resource here.
And the best choice is 1, because for each minute the chickens are alive, they are burning calories which could be keeping you alive.
So what am I getting at here? Since herbavours eat plants, there is not a lot of ‘lost efficiency’ when an herbivore eat. But when carnivores eat, they are eating other animals, so so consume 1lb of edible meat from another animal, it takes roughly 10lbs of edible plant matter. So herbivours, (and animals like blue whales that eat organisms like plankton that are low on the food chain) are able to become much larger because they are able to process energy from the sun much more efficiently. A tiger could never be as big as an elephant because of how many damn elephants it would need to eat to get to and maintain that amount of muscle, but an elephant can be that big because eating leaves is much more efficient.
I don’t know exactly the reason overall but something interesting to note that’s correlated is that Gorillas have pot bellies because of their gut biome. They’re bloated from all the microbial activity in their gut which they need in order to digest the plants they eat.
I haven’t seen the actual correct answer on here yet so let me take a crack at it in ELI5 fashion. If you were stranded on a desert island with only some chicken and some grain, and you needed to survive as long as possible, what’s the best strategy. You have 3 choices:
1 Eat the grain, then when that runs out, eat the chickens.
2 eat the chicken, then eat the grain
3 feed the grain to the chicken to make the chicken stay fat while you only eat the chicken.
Now 3 is obviously the worst choice, because you’re now keeping alive yourself and chickens which takes a ton of energy (food) which is a limited resource here.
And the best choice is 1, because for each minute the chickens are alive, they are burning calories which could be keeping you alive.
So what am I getting at here? Since herbavours eat plants, there is not a lot of ‘lost efficiency’ when an herbivore eat. But when carnivores eat, they are eating other animals, so so consume 1lb of edible meat from another animal, it takes roughly 10lbs of edible plant matter. So herbivours, (and animals like blue whales that eat organisms like plankton that are low on the food chain) are able to become much larger because they are able to process energy from the sun much more efficiently. A tiger could never be as big as an elephant because of how many damn elephants it would need to eat to get to and maintain that amount of muscle, but an elephant can be that big because eating leaves is much more efficient.
I haven’t seen the actual correct answer on here yet so let me take a crack at it in ELI5 fashion. If you were stranded on a desert island with only some chicken and some grain, and you needed to survive as long as possible, what’s the best strategy. You have 3 choices:
1 Eat the grain, then when that runs out, eat the chickens.
2 eat the chicken, then eat the grain
3 feed the grain to the chicken to make the chicken stay fat while you only eat the chicken.
Now 3 is obviously the worst choice, because you’re now keeping alive yourself and chickens which takes a ton of energy (food) which is a limited resource here.
And the best choice is 1, because for each minute the chickens are alive, they are burning calories which could be keeping you alive.
So what am I getting at here? Since herbavours eat plants, there is not a lot of ‘lost efficiency’ when an herbivore eat. But when carnivores eat, they are eating other animals, so so consume 1lb of edible meat from another animal, it takes roughly 10lbs of edible plant matter. So herbivours, (and animals like blue whales that eat organisms like plankton that are low on the food chain) are able to become much larger because they are able to process energy from the sun much more efficiently. A tiger could never be as big as an elephant because of how many damn elephants it would need to eat to get to and maintain that amount of muscle, but an elephant can be that big because eating leaves is much more efficient.
Herbivores eat alot of calorie poor food that takes time to digest. Plants. Carnivores eat calorie rich food that digests quickly by comparison. Herbivores need to have much higher gut volume to collect the energy they need from their food. Look at the difference in girth from a chimp (omnivore ) to a gorilla (herbivore) for a good comparison of similar species.
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Not all herbivores are big but being big is one strategy that protects some animals from danger. Most predators have to move a lot to find prey and that takes even more energy if they’re bigger. A cow doesn’t have to chase their food so it doesn’t hurt them to be big and heavy, it just makes them safer.
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Herbivores eat alot of calorie poor food that takes time to digest. Plants. Carnivores eat calorie rich food that digests quickly by comparison. Herbivores need to have much higher gut volume to collect the energy they need from their food. Look at the difference in girth from a chimp (omnivore ) to a gorilla (herbivore) for a good comparison of similar species.
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