Pretty much as the question states: How is it that animals that consume mostly vegetation as opposed to meat so strong?
More specifically, how are animals like gorillas and horses so strong/decked out with so much muscle mass if they primarily eat grass/hay (in the case of horses) or leaves and bananas and bugs (in the case of gorillas? I understand that certain animals metabolize (break down and use) different foods differently, but it’s just mind blowing to me that these animals have such large muscles on such vegetable-heavy diets.
Moreover, they’re able to gain and maintain this muscle mass on these lean diets while also using those muscles almost ALL OF THE TIME. I mean, it would be difficult enough for a human to achieve such a muscle mass eating that same type of diet, but I would imagine that it would be EXTREMELY difficult for humans to achieve and maintain that level of muscle mass while simultaneously burning so many calories each day by using those muscles – I would imagine that a human with a similar diet with that amount of physical activity and that kind of diet would be fit and muscular, but have more of a “lean” or
“slim” muscular build instead of looking jacked like a horse or a gorilla.
So, what gives? How are they able to be so strong on such vegetable-heavy diets?
In: Biology
It’s all about the…
#Digestive system!
So for example, let’s take your question but let’s just narrow it down to one of humanity’s closest cousin species only:
The Gorillas.
Gorillas are INSANELY strong and muscular.
And yet they’re by far mostly vegetarian. So what gives? How do they do it?
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Well, in the case of Gorillas…
It turns out that their internal digestive tract kept evolving to specially harbor and lovingly care for a few specialized bacteria species. (Your digestive tract did not. Nor did mine!)
Those bacterial species then returned the favor in a big way and did the Gorillas a serious solid, a muscle-mass-solid to be specific! They did it by becoming ever more incredibly adept at transforming the Gorillas vegetarian diet into large amounts of extremely high quality complete protein.
And then it is this protein that in turn then gets absorbed into the gorillas blood stream, and is used for building up really crazy levels of muscle mass.
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In short, if you designed a viral payload to kill only the bacterial species in a Gorilla’s gut that transforms vegetative matter into high quality abundant protein…
Then Gorillas would quickly go extinct. End of story.
They can’t do it without that symbiosis of the bacteria in their gut.
(Same is true, but in other varied ways for other animals, such as cows, etc…)
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