When animals (fish) eat something whole, how does it kill and digest it’s prey?

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When animals (fish) eat something whole, how does it kill and digest it’s prey?

In: Biology

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The killing part is simple: if an animal is in a larger animal’s stomach, they can die by any or all of the following:

Starvation, suffocation, dehydration, blunt force trauma being crushed by the stomach muscles during digestion, bleeding out of lesions caused by stomach acid eating away the skin and outer muscular structure. Take your pick.

Once the animal is dead (or still alive), digestion works the same as it does with any stomach: mixing corrosive acids with squeezing, churning, and crushing motion from the stomach muscles to break down the animal’s body into a sort of protein slurry, then passing it through the digestive tract.

Whether you, as a human, chew your steak into a mush in your mouth before swallowing, or eat whole big chunks, your stomach is still capable of digesting it. It’s just EASIER if you chew it up first, cause you give your stomach more surface area with which to work.

But put a whole raw steak in a jar of Muriatic acid (same basic chemical as stomach acid, though probably more concentrated), and after a couple days you’ll be able to spread it like peanut butter.