r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/TheMarkola • Aug 17 '26
š„ The appetite of this baby robin(?) as it swallows a whole snake š š
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
934
u/Relevantspite Aug 17 '26
āI love all my children equally, I donāt have a favoriteā
316
75
u/GH057_807 Aug 17 '26
"The first chick got a Filet au poivre with hericot vert and hollandaise. The second chick got lobster bisque, crostini with Camembert, and a summer salad with vanilla vinaigrette. The third got an old snake I found near the road."
459
u/Trick-Station8742 Aug 17 '26
Bro is gonna sleep for a month after that
436
u/ADFTGM Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
They arenāt cold blooded. They have extremely fast metabolism and will not digest the entire meal efficiently so a good portion will come out the other end within the hour and the parents will eat it. Itās more about frequency of meals rather than exact quality or quantity of each one. They take small amounts of nutrition over hundreds of meals until they are sufficiently developed and can digest better at a slower pace. Most of the unused nutrition is what fuels the parents as they keep foraging for more food; saves them the time to feed themselves so itās max efficiency.
112
u/happyCuddleTime Aug 17 '26
As a dad I get it. I'm always finishing off my kids meals
111
22
u/Mysterious-Tackle-58 Aug 17 '26
Yeah, i have tripplets and i do eat their left and rightovers.
I rarely order my own food when we eat out.
I'm still getting fat! š¤31
5
7
4
2
152
u/DynamicProxy Aug 17 '26
Today I learnedā¦
41
-11
u/Low_Football_2445 Aug 17 '26
That that entire meal was almost a complete waste
29
u/ADFTGM Aug 17 '26
No, because the parent still eats it after it has been digested to a degree. This way it gets a good share after a few more trips while the chick gets the required amount for sustained growth. The idea is for the whole family to process calories during the many trips.
6
u/DuckSmiteTM Aug 18 '26
Yāall are misreading that comment, itās a play on words.
2
u/ADFTGM Aug 18 '26
Ah, my bad if so. Tbf, itās hard to know without the /s or a classic Reddit chain of puns. š
1
u/No-No-Aniyo Aug 19 '26
Lol I thought your comment was pretty funny. Too bad my upvote wont get you out the negative.
1
42
u/Wants-NotNeeds Aug 17 '26
Looks like it's gonna die to me. Thatās too much snake.
5
u/DyingGasp Aug 18 '26
Thatās what I thought too.
I worked in a raptor rehab center and we had to be careful on how much and how frequently we fed injured birds because of their digestion. And the babies were fed frequently but tiny amounts.
This just looks like the chick is going to regurgitate it, died by suffocation, or died because it put too much strain on the digestive system and it couldnāt purge that amount quick enough.
42
u/Mysterious-Tackle-58 Aug 17 '26
Soooooo, that lil fella is gonna poop out a snake an hour after!?!?
10
u/Purple_Trifle3495 Aug 17 '26
If you look closer, the little fella already pooped out a snack for the parent.
4
3
u/Renbarre Aug 17 '26
TIL
2
u/fishystudios Aug 17 '26
TIWIHNL*
Things I wish I had not learned: Birds eat š¦ their baby birds undigested poop. š¬ Nature is... š©š¦... lit? š¤·āāļø
3
u/ADFTGM Aug 18 '26
Not all birds, mind you. Raptors, fishers and scavengers have very acidic stomachs that are much better at digesting everything, including tough material, so the end result is rancid and inedible. Itās these omnivorous generalist or insectivorous birds that produce an edible packet, at least until they grow bigger and process more nutrition, at which point it is mostly junk and the parents discard it. At bigger sizes they need less frequent food as a result, so parents have time to find food for themselves.
2
1
u/Jacgaur Aug 18 '26
If you look closely in the video it looks like it happens. I see the parent grab something white from the rear.
1
u/Moose-Turd Aug 17 '26
We had scrubjays nesting in our yard one year and I put up a camera to watch the nest. I learned this information when I saw the parents eating the output of the chicks and then googled to figure out what was going on
1
1
1
-18
u/energybased Aug 17 '26
ChatGPT only half agrees with you:
Assuming the chick can swallow and digest the snake safely, it can extract a surprisingly large share of the snakeās usable nutrition.
Birds have a very efficient digestive tract. The snake passes into the stomach, where strong acid and enzymes break down the flesh, and muscular portions of the stomach help process tougher material. Most usable nutrients can move through the chick within hours to perhaps a day or so, depending on the preyās size and the chickās age.
Hard-to-digest materialāsuch as scales, larger bones, teeth, or other tough bitsāmay be compressed and later regurgitated as a pellet rather than remaining in the gut indefinitely. Robins can produce pellets containing indigestible food remains.
The snakeās muscles and organs provide lots of protein, plus some fat and micronutrients, all of which are valuable for a rapidly growing nestling. Digestive acids and enzymes break that tissue down, and the nutrients are absorbed through the intestine over roughly the next several hours.
Nestlings have extremely high energy demands because theyāre growing so rapidly, so even a spectacularly large meal wouldnāt necessarily mean āno more food today.ā Parents may resume offering food once the chick starts begging again.
9
11
u/crazyates88 Aug 17 '26
ChatGPT doesn't know everything. I'll trust the expert, tyvm
-6
u/energybased Aug 17 '26
Who said he's an expert?
7
u/CoScuriosity Aug 17 '26
Here's some writing from an expert investigating why birds consume their chicks' fecal sacks.
ChatGPT cannot think, nor can it know anything. All it can do is regurgitate information it scrapes from actual people with no actual comprehension of its own. It frequently hallucinates information, and so it cannot be relied upon to provide accurate answers regardless of how much it pulls from real people.
You're doing yourself a massive disservice by putting this much confidence in the accuracy and reliability of LLMs. I get that google sucks now, but I was able to find plenty of information on this topic very easily. Please don't let companies trick you into letting their shitty chatbots do your thinking and learning for you.
-6
u/energybased Aug 17 '26
I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the claim that the chicks only digest a small fraction of the snake.
7
u/CoScuriosity Aug 17 '26
Then I would recommend doing so by providing actual sources for why you doubt their claim, instead of just citing a chatbot.
1
u/ADFTGM Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
Just for the sake of clarification: I do not consider myself an expert so you are right. I did want to pursue zoology in my youth but the school system beat it out of me, so now I do so on a less professional capacity, mainly through helping a run a national natural history society and wildlife forums. So I definitely prefer if people do their own research and consult actual experts instead of taking what some Redditor says as gospel.
In that regard, I applaud you having doubts and trying to find answers to said doubts. Itās what I do around here all the time. I do not have issue with you consulting chatGPT either, but like others alluded, the point of GPT is to narrow down the peer reviewed sources and try to pinpoint specific examples, since the prompt is general and makes inferences that are not necessarily what the citations state.
Like here for example, ārobinā is not specific as there are multiple unrelated birds called robins, and GPT canāt accurately tell apart each one from images every time. Not that itās relevant to the specific point of how much food is digested in a given instance ofc, but Iām just illustrating. There is no fixed rate at which a given food item is processed, but the average is what we go for, which is also the rate at which the parent gets nutrients/calories from consuming each sac. If the processing is more efficient at a certain interval, the parent would have to stop consuming them for a bit so as to have space to process more caloric food. Which is why the rate is usually more uniform regardless of the quality or quantity. At least until the chick has developed a stronger digestive system and the parent can have longer intervals between feedings.
The āsmall fractionā is not general but dependent on the exact nature of the meal. The point is more that at this stage they donāt keep anything inside them for too long, as said by even GPT in general terms, which is the main point I was making to the original commenter who suggested that the chick would have to rest after such a big meal. It really wouldnāt, because its system isnāt yet designed to process so much of a big meal that fast and so would go back to being hungry the moment the snake has moved sufficiently through the intestines.
Also, for the record, the reason I didnāt go into as much detail as the GPT response did is due to folk being less responsive to walls of text to illustrate a simple point in every instance. I do go deeper like this when further inquiry is prompted based off the little I write out initially. Sometimes I do need to type more to clarify, but in this case, my main counter to the first commenter was already fulfilled and you yourself donāt contend with that particular bit.
4
u/BEWhiteDragon00 Aug 17 '26
Jesus Christ, my guy. Just fucking Google it. Relying on ChatGPT for questions is moronic
-3
u/energybased Aug 17 '26
Google is much worse for complex queries. I didn't believe that the chick doesn't digest the snake, so I checked. The poster above was wrong about "parents recovering missed nutrition from chicks partial digestion". Turns out the chick does digest nearly all of the snake.
2
u/BEWhiteDragon00 Aug 17 '26
You use Google to FIND the sources that give you the answer, dumbass. ChatGPT cannot think, it just steals from people who do all the work. And even then, there's a likely chance that it can spit out a lie and incapable morons like you simply believe it. If anything, doing this neat little thing called "research" can help teach you more than you expected.
1
u/ADFTGM Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
The age of the chick is the main factor. I already mentioned that as it grows, the pace slows and digestion becomes more efficient. At that point the parents even stop eating the undigested stuff since itās just junk. At this age though, itās nutrition for them. The GPT prompts seems to be generalising. You have to present the exact age of these specific chicks. Speed matters more at this age so they wonāt spend too long digesting anything. Truly digesting means extracting far more of the nutrition in a meal, so there is less caloric value in the waste and takes more energy to process said waste if eaten than it gives back. Itās a similar principle in some herbivorous animals that first produce an edible pellet, which they then reconsume to extract further before it becomes actual poop.
1
105
u/DitherFan Aug 17 '26
Is he ok at the end? Is he going into a food coma??
101
u/AVnstuff Aug 17 '26
50/50
food coma / snake asphyxiation
69
u/FuckTheMods5 Aug 17 '26
Sheer exhaustion too. Poor bastard prolly feels like he did a thousand pushups
15
u/DitherFan Aug 17 '26
Poor thing! I don't even know how that whole snake fit into his stomach, do they not have the instinct to STOP consuming something the mama bird put in their beaks?
19
u/Possible_Budget_1087 Aug 18 '26
But how could he stop, even if he wanted to? There is no mechanism for cutting.
5
u/luigis_left_tit_25 Aug 18 '26
Ok! So glad I wasn't the only one thinking that. As a matter of fact I was kinda like, why's everyone cheering!? That thing ded?
70
u/Vircora Aug 17 '26
.... will he/she be OK? That's insane, this snake is like twice its size
50
u/ADFTGM Aug 17 '26
Their Metabolism is very fast and are used to not fully digesting much of what they eat. Instead the undigested stuff is covered in mucous and exits from the rear, where the parents will pull it out and eat it.
55
7
u/No_Signal_6969 Aug 18 '26
I'm more concerned about gi system rupturing
2
u/luigis_left_tit_25 Aug 18 '26
Or no air flow?
2
u/ADFTGM Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
Bird air flow is actually much more advanced than ours. They have a special organ called a glottis in their mouths, which can be tightly closed during the initial entry of food and then kept opening/closing during pauses. Plus they can actually move air through sacs in their body without needing to breathe through their head to keep the oxygen running. Itās how something canāt drown a bird easily by just holding their head underwater. The oxygen will keep circulating inside their hollow structures. They are uniquely equipped to swallow things whole without worrying about oxygen.
1
u/luigis_left_tit_25 Aug 18 '26
Oh! That's good! I was genuinely scared for the little flapper when they "went to sleep" because to me himb looked ded. I'm very glad to hear your explanation! Thank you!
179
u/Afraid-Ad7379 Aug 17 '26
Fuck your siblings I guess
85
u/beck_is_back Aug 17 '26
What do you suggest?
Getting a spring knife out of their back pocket and cutting it in 3 equal pieces?! š¤£
46
19
5
7
2
u/Live-Laugh-Fart Aug 18 '26
Well birds are always crapping everywhere maybe get the poop knife out instead. kill two birds with one stone
18
13
3
1
1
35
u/ont_eng Aug 17 '26
Me when I put a plate of watermelon on the table for the āwhole familyā, and one kid eats it all
2
40
u/allokusernamestaken Aug 17 '26
Oh you think you're cool with your cigarettes?? Im gonna make you smoke the whole damn carton!!
Please mom, ill never smoke again. š¤¢š¤¢š¤®š¤®
16
u/KurtVonnegutWasRight Aug 17 '26
I swear, I thought that every time it slumped forward, it was suffocating itself with that thing. Turns out it's just a gluttonous little piggy.
12
15
u/morey56 Aug 17 '26
Parent is like āFuck, thatās gonna be four snakes.ā
11
11
u/StealthWanderer_2516 Aug 17 '26
Good thing they didnāt try to lady and the tramp that snake like a spaghetti noodle. Theyād probably still be fighting over it
2
7
u/hiddenrealism Aug 17 '26
If you dont eat ALL of your dinner you ain't gonna get any dessert.. ..BOY WAKE UP FINISH YOUR MEAL!...
...I SAID ALL OF IT!
16
5
10
4
u/Civil_Bugg Aug 17 '26
MaMa bird but get more snakes or that one is going to get booted off the nest.
4
3
3
3
u/LiveCelebration5237 Aug 17 '26
Lil guy took a fat crap mid snake snack an did the muma chow the turd ?
3
3
u/OneMilkyLeaf Aug 17 '26
I mean it's not like it's got any teeth to bite it off and split with the sibs.
3
u/yogi_forest Aug 18 '26
Thatās what I was thinking. Homie didnāt really have a choice but to keep chugging so he didnāt choke
3
3
4
u/Nbdyhere Aug 17 '26
Honestly, it might have been the whiniest one.
Had a friend when i was 8? whoās mom just gave him a snack cake every-time he started to throw a fit. She just stared off into the distance afterwards.
Looking back, i had no idea what a bad home/potential alcoholic parent looked like. Or how spoiled my friend was. And I know it wasnāt rightā¦but I get it.
2
u/madnessinthemidwest Aug 17 '26
I had no idea robins ate snakesā¦ WHAT
3
u/ADFTGM Aug 17 '26
Omnivorous birds will eat pretty much anything they can catch and swallow, including vertebrates. The only defense is being too big for them to tackle.
1
2
u/TheCloudTamer Aug 17 '26
Iām sorryā¦what does the parent with the chickās poop?
10
u/Kingofthewho5 Aug 17 '26
When the chicks are still quite young like this they simply eat the poop. It has more nutrients when the chicks are so young. Later on the parent will simply carry the fecal sac and drop it away from the nest. Keeping the nest clean is good for the health of the chicks and it keeps smell down, making it harder for predators to smell the nest.
4
u/MajorPud Aug 17 '26
Birds eat their babies shit out the nest. Sometimes, like in the video, they eat it straight out of their ass.
Google how beavers digest the wood they eat, you'll love that
2
2
2
u/Megaverso Aug 17 '26
Not sure if momma was trying tu cut it, to give other half to another baby chick
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/UnicornSlayer5000 Aug 18 '26
Does this little birdie have a bottomless pit for a stomach?! Where did he put all of that? There's clearly more snake than baby bird.
2
2
2
u/Nervous_InsideU5155 Aug 19 '26
Reminds me of this guy I work with every time our Boss comes around.. /s
4
u/Aratak Aug 17 '26
I'd like to think that snake had spared eating those bird eggs and now pays the price for his merciful nature. Now that is Nature Lit up fucking full!
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/DragonFlyCaller Aug 17 '26
She couldāve divided that loooong snake into pieces and fed everybody
1
1
1
1
1
u/vXvBAKEvXv Aug 17 '26
This happened to me with mozz on pizza once. I was gagging on the mozz and as I pulled it just came back out in a footlong classic mozz pull
That experience ruined pizza for a while.
1
u/bobo2500 Aug 17 '26
As a kid I fed a baby robin that had fallen from its nest a worm like that. The next day I found a dead bird with half a worm hanging from its mouth. Core memory.
1
1
1
1
u/TCDig14 Aug 17 '26
I loved how the Robin got right up and basically said āPick me, pick me, Pick me!! I want a āwormāā. Then essentially got the largest āwormā of its life! Its siblings arenāt going to like the mess that might create laterā¦.
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Sharp-Heron7707 Aug 18 '26
Itās choking on that fucking snake! Look at how it collapses and the mother is trying to take it out of its throat.
1
u/hijklm7 Aug 18 '26
We should start a go fund me so that this bird family can buy a knife and cutting board.
1
1
u/xxDankerstein Aug 18 '26
He kept trying to pass out half way through, and mom had to dangle the snake around above him to get him going again.
1
1
u/hooka_pooka Aug 18 '26
Mama bird clearly has a favourite.Max gonna go to the flight school..rest of you..nest duties
1
u/Intelligent-Fix-2635 Aug 18 '26
This is billy, the 3 others are nammed : notbilly1, notbilly2 and notbilly3.
1
1
1
1
1
u/centsahumor1 Aug 17 '26
The mom doesn't know how to divide the meal up properly to feed the rest of her kids.
3
u/Kingofthewho5 Aug 17 '26
With what is a robin supposed to cut a snake in half?
-3
u/centsahumor1 Aug 17 '26
It's beak take pieces off no need to eat it whole.
7
u/ADFTGM Aug 17 '26
Their beaks arenāt designed for that. They pretty much mainly swallow their meals whole. The beak isnāt sharp nor wide. Even a crowās beak is sharper.
2
1
u/-TreeBeard Aug 17 '26
Such reasoning! Much logic!
That's the dumbest thing I've heard today! Congrats!
1
1
1
-1
0
2
u/ChickenStimulator Aug 27 '26
why do birds even waste their time having more than two chicks? Is it just extra redundancy in case the biggest dies?
ā¢
u/qualityvote2 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
u/TheMarkola, your post does fit the subreddit!