I’m pretty sure this is a factual question. Pretty sure. If a creature like bigfoot exists, and it is physiologically similar to gigantopithecus blacki (an extinct species of primate that was about 10 feet tall, about 1100 pounds and very muscular, although blacki supposedly wasn’t bipedal) how many calories a day would something like that require to survive?
I believe humans need about 50 calories for every pound of muscle added to their frame. I have no idea how many calories you need for other lean tissues like the heart or liver on a pound for pound basis.
Plus if there was some kind of 10 foot tall, 1100 pound muscular creature that was living a hunter gatherer lifestyle it would need to do a lot of walking, hiking, possibly swimming and running, etc.
Is about 20,000-25,000 calories a day a good estimate? That would be over 20 calories per pound per day, which assuming a muscular frame and an active lifestyle would be roughly right. But I believe as your size increases your caloric needs decrease. An elephant uses far fewer calories than a bunch of mice that collectively weigh as much as an elephant.
I read gorillas need up to 40 pounds a day of vegetation to survive, wouldn’t a creature like that need closer to 150-200 pounds a day to survive? Can a primate digestive system process that much vegetation?
This is a pretty easy calculation. Just look up what gorillas consume and scale appropriately. But I’ll give you one hint: Gigantopithecus wasn’t a hunter/gatherer.
I don’t agree with that site. In college I was 260 pounds and exercised about 3-4x a week. That site says I’d need 2984 at that rate, but I really needed closer to 4000 a day. I lost weight on 3500 calories a day back then.
Probably pretty close. But you could do the same calcs for gorillas and orangutans to get an idea of what the bounds would be. Gigantopithecus might have been more closely related to orangs, but because of their size, they probably had a lifestyle more like a gorilla.
A quick google failed to find cites for the number of calories consumed similar sized animals. Bear in mind, the amount doesn’t go up linearly with body mass. Small (warm blodded) creatures consume a much higher fraction of their bodyweight each day than larger ones. They are much less efficient at retaining their body heat, as they have a much higher ratio of surface area to volume.
One approach would be to look at the scientific work on estimating the caloric needs of a different closely related human species, Neandertal. This article estimates that cold adapted male and female Neandertals likely expended about 4700 and 3200 KCal/d respectively each. Neandertals were larger than anatomically modern humans, albeit were not giants.
Another would be to look at another cold adapted omnivorous species, one that is more giant compared to modern humans. Polar bears on average appear to require 12,000 to 16,000 KCal/d to prevent weight loss and weigh in any where from 390 pounds for a smaller female to 1500 pounds for a large male.
I don’t think that Sasquatch is portrayed as being as big as a polar bear though. My WAG would imagine BigFoot as being as much bigger than Neandertal than Neandertal was than modern humans and adding something like 10% to those Neandertal estimates … 5200ish KCal/d for a male.
I’m gonna go with using bears as analogs. A bear is omnivorous and furry. Some species are about that size & weight. Bears often live in the same climates as hypothetical Bigfoots whereas gorillas & orangs live in the tropics where keeping warm is not such an issue.
Wiki tells me a lot about many species of bears, but daily caloric intake isn’t one of the factoids I was able to come up with.
I’m also going to question how a 10 foot tall great ape gets to be 1100 lbs. We have 6.5 ft tall uber-muscular giants now (read NFL linemen) and they come in around 300 lbs. Bumping height 50% ought to increase weight about 2.5x. So ~750 lbs. It’s a good bet there’s not much fat on a large foraging ape.
While I agree that elephants & mice have very difference requirements measured in calories/kg/day, I’m gonna suggest that as between a NFL-sized human and a 2.5x heavier humanoid, the cal/kg/day number is gonna change at most a few percent. So triple what an NFL player eats on a game or full-up practice day & you’ll be close or even a bit generous.
“Hunter/gatherer” is a term used to describe humans and some of our recent ancestors. It implies a home base to which food is brought and shared among the social group. It has never to my knowledge been applied to non-human animals. No one would call a chimp a hunter/gatherer even though they occasionally hunt and might be said gather (although forage is more accurate).
We don’t know a lot about Giganto, but the teeth seem to indicate it was herbivorous or mostly herbivorous, like all the other non-human great apes. Humans, like the other apes, would make very unsuccessful carnivores/omnivores without stone tools and there is no evidence that Giganto made stone tools.
I have a hard time with a “law” that handwaves away multiple examples that don’t fit (?falsify?) the law with
Um, no. In a battle between “recalcitrant data” and an “elegant model”, the data wins, as elegant as the model may be.
It may be a reasonable “principle”, a major factor even, a rough estimate starting point … but no “law” handwaves away data that does not fit in such a manner.