That is a good point. Eating corn husks could well be more damaging to your teeth than eating corn kernals.
There may be silica or other abrasive effects from the food, but its the intentional grittiness of the grinding stones that seems to cause the teeth of many early skulls to be abraded as flat as a board, planing enamel, pulp and dentine, which must have been horrifically painful.
Humans and pigs have notably heterogenous teeth that equip them for eating anything that moves, including koalas. They did, from all reports, taste strongly and unpleasantly eucalyptussy.
An extreme example of this restricted diet species would be Dryococelus, the Lord Howe Island stick insect which was classified as extinct in 1920 until an isolated remnant colony was suspected in 1964 and confirmed in 2001 where the entire population of 24 insects existed on a single shrub of Melaleuca howeana.
The conservation program was founded on two breeding pairs with the primary question was whether these critters, isolated for generations in a crevice on Ball’s Pyramid were capable of surviving on other specimens of Melaleuca howeana, or due to some environmental/genetic interaction only this particular shrub.
After initially successfully breeding on near identical habitat on it has been established they can flourish on a much wider range of plants. Now the once rarest insect in the world has insurance populations in several of the world’s zoos. A recolonisation program planned on Lord Howe Island after the extermination of the feral black rat population.
A vet specializing in koala fecal transplants would be a very niche occupation.
When I got to that last word I jumbled a couple of letters which triggered a rogue idea for the title of a new James Bond movie set in Oz: Eucalytpussy.
James Bond to be played by a trained Koala?
Ref the current Star Wars retrospective thread running in CS:
Maybe an AI-generated critter more like an Ewok. Kinda cute except for the vicious habit of eating humans for the fun of it.
Do they even have more than one bush on that thing?
Lots of parasitoid insects rely of single-species hosts for egg laying safety & gooey yumyums for baby. Some are known to affect behavior in ultraspecialized ways. I got interested after witnessing cicada killer wasps in my own yard in Chicago.
Acording to the wikiarticle about Dryococelus, the stick insect:
In 2014, an unauthorised climbing team sighted live stick insects near the summit of Ball’s Pyramid, in a thicket of sedge plants rooted in very thin soils at an altitude of 500 metres, suggesting that the insect’s range on the island is more widespread than previously thought, and that its food preferences are not limited to Melaleuca howeana.
So this stick insect eats a more divere diet than claimed.
Does gut bacteria add a source of B-12 for animals that are strict herbivores?
Oh, yes, parasites and parasitoids can be highly spezialised! We had some discussion about them in the “random interesting fact” thread, like here and in some posts before and after that:
Speaking of the Iberian Lynx where I take my avatar and name from, they were extremely specialised eaters, their diet being almost exclusively rabbits. Then myxomatosis hit the rabbits hard and the lynx almost went extinct. They are very good at catching rabbits, but they struggle with birds, it seems. Their life would be easier if they learned to diversify their diet.
No, but I can visualize Ernst Stavro Blofeld petting a white Koala in his lap.
“Ah, Mr. Bond! Come in, come in. Don’t mind the gunmen behind you. We were discussing our Eucalyptus breeding program. One day, Everyone will be dying to eat our bioengineered eucalyptus leaves.”
Yes, rabbits depend on coprophagy (eating their poop) for some of their nutrients, including a lot of B vitamins produces by bacteria in their gut.
Rabbits produce two kinds of poop, and only eat one kind. I suspect some larger animals with longer, more effective guts can digest those nutrients directly, but rabbits need to move quickly, and can’t carry around all the gut contents that a larger herbivore can afford to carry around.
Yes ive had two rabbits, and they ate their poop. I had no idea why - i assumed they found some plant rests there. But as you say, maybe not.
(They both died – although after many years, so poop might be ok for rabbits, more than old age is)
It might, you know, simply taste good. Who are we to judge? Just ask your dog.
There’s a documentary which features this sort of dangerous animal, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
They need to eat their poop, if you prevent them from doing it, they’ll get sick.
Would have been an excellent follow-up for George Lazerbeam. He’d have been shaken AND stirred.
My mother keeps a range of stick insects, though not the Lord Howe Island species. One of the species she’s kept for years, according to her, can eat a reasonably large range of plant species, but only if they are introduced to them at a very young age.
So, if you keep a hatchling on privet only, then move it to bramble when it’s a few months old, it won’t recognise it as food and will just sit there and starve. Likewise if you keep a hatchling on only bramble, then move it to privet it will starve, while if you give it both when it’s tiny, it can eat both.
I wonder if something similar was happening there.