General > Biology

Sharks and grass

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shvarz:
In discussions about specialization it has often been mentioned that certain species spcialize in eating certain types of food and can't switch to others.  One of the examples was shark, which cannot suddenly learn to eat grass if meat becomes unavailable.

Cows eat only grass, wolves eat only meat, some bacteria survive only on certain and very rare chemical compounds, which can be found next to active volcanoes.  But ability to digest and extract energy from different things cannot be likened to distributing some "points" between different categories.  It cannot be stated that cows gave all their "feeding points" to grass and there was nothing left to give to meat.  In fact, cows could have meat-digesting enzymes.  But why bother?  They don't hunt anyway.  Take a bear - it can eat almost anything - meat, fish, berries, mushrooms, eggs, garbage.  Is bear worse in digesting meat than a wolf?  No.  Is it worse in digesting mushrooms than a squirrel?  No.

The real specialization does not come in form of enzymes - it comes in form of different behaviours and different strategies to find food.  If you can find food in abundance - the enzymes will come.  Here is an example with humans.  Originally the enzymes that digest milk were only present in babies - to digest mother's milk.  Adult humans could not digest milk.  Then they learned to grow cows and obtain milk from them.  As a result, a mutation appeared that allowed adults to digest milk.  Now it is present in majority of population and only some unfortunate people don't have it.  Availability of food lead to appearance of enzymes.

Zelos:
cows eat meat, they have seen a cow kill a rabit and eat it, honestly. and shvarz, I think it will be that later

shvarz:
"They" must have been on crack :)

Zelos:
nope, they just hadnt all the proteins they needed, but they are in meat, so they eat meat to get it

Numsgil:
Cows will eat anything.

Scrap Iron, other cows (mad cow disease) etc.  They aren't the smartest animals around.

Meat is relatively easy for all animals to digest, but plants are very difficult.  They require alot of mechanical breakdown and redigestion upon redigestion.

How would you propose we model something like this in DB?

And at what level does multicellular strategies no longer work on unicellular levels?

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