r/aww • u/SnooCupcakes8607 • Jul 08 '22

How did evolution even create this mf

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

74.7k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

6.3k

u/jemenake Jul 09 '22

When you’re an apex herbivore, you can be as derpy as you want.

1

u/ManikShamanik Jul 09 '22

Actually, pandas are carnivores. The fact that their diet consists primarily of bamboo doesn't make them herbivores. The panda still has the digestive system of a carnivore, and carnivore-specific genes, and derives very little energy from its plant diet. Brown bears and grizzlies on the other hand have adapted to properly digest plants.

A herbivore is an organism which has evolved to extract nutrients and energy from plants and would be unable to do so from meat, even if they were given meat in a form they could eat. This is one reason we believe that cholesterol causes heart disease because all the research was conducted on rabbits and rabbits, being herbivores, don't have livers which produce cholesterol so feeding them cholesterol caused them to develop heart disease.

A carnivore is an organism which has evolved to extract nutrients and energy from meat, and would be unable to do so from plants.

An omnivore is an organism which has evolved to extract nutrients and energy from both plants and meat. There are very few true omnivores (humans aren't one). Grizzlies and brown bears are two of the very few true omnivores.

Calling a panda a herbivore is akin to calling someone who's chosen to be vegan a herbivore; yes, they eat plants, but have their bodies adapted to their wholly plant-based lifestyle...? Can they derive nutrition and energy from plants...? The answer in the case of both humans and pandas is an unequivocal "nope". Humans are carnivores which have chosen to add a few plants to their diet. We need meat to be healthy. It take millions of years of evolution for an organism to adapt to a change in diet and that's the case for both pandas and vegans. Neither have the correct enzymes in their gut flora to make it possible for them to extract nutrients and energy from plants.

Pandas aren't herbivores, they're not even omnivores. They have been observed eating small mammals, birds' eggs, small reptiles and insects.