Grasses contain a lot of silica. Possibly evolved partly to make them even less desirable to grazers. (They can also contribute to structure.) But of course many grazers evolved tougher teeth and guts to handle that.
Silica and other mineral compounds aren’t going to do human digestive systems any favors.
Then there’s stuff like calcium oxalate as well as more serious poisons. (At least calcium oxalate warns you you’re eating something bad.)
If by fibrous Meadow muffins you mean Irresistible Great Dane Treats then you’d be correct. Gunner the Great Dane for some unknown reason will eat them like potato chips if he knows I’m not looking. Yuck!
Are you just being extra-cautious with ‘possibly’ or are there serious competing explanations?
That’s the consensus interpretation. Animals that eat grass wear down their teeth at a furious rate, and have evolved teeth that can handle it. By the end of their lives usually their teeth are nearly gone. The old saying, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth? You can tell how old a horse is by looking at how worn their teeth are. But if somebody gives you a free horse you shouldn’t complain that they gave you an old one.
or like rodents and rabbits, they have teeth which grow continuously and actually need to be worn down regularly.
And IIRC my “fun biology facts” rabbits recycle their meadow raisins (much like a Great Dane?) since the bacteria that work on the cellulose continue to process it for a while after excretion, and then on re-ingestion provide added bunny nutrition.
I assumed the silicas were mainly to deter grazers, but Googled it and it seems that it isn’t a resolved matter. Esp. since in several cases the contribute quite a bit to structure.
But they are an issue to grazers throughout the digestive process, not just the teeth.
Actually, I rather like grass. There’s a bit near the base of a growing stalk that’s sweet and juicy, and I often pluck sine grass and easy that bit on a summer afternoon.
But it’s not like there’s any significant food value there.
As for neurotoxins, nah, it is surfectly pafe.
Sigh. Sorry about the auto correct/swype.
“I often pluck some grass and eat that bit.”
We of course eat lots of plants and parts of plants, but grass is very difficult to extract food value out of, and requires specialized digestive apparati that we do not possess. Ruminants (cows, goat, sheep, deer etc) have a complexity of stomachs to do this with. Their system enables them to eat a whole lot of grass all at once and then retire to safety to re-chew it at their leisure – ruminating in fact. That’s the cud.
Equids (horses, zebras, onagers, donkeys) have a different system. One smallish stomach but an enormous caecum, which is their digestive refinery. Unlike ruminants, they pretty much eat 24/7 at a slow pace. Horses in a natural environment rest very little, they are always eating. This is how they thrive on a very low-nutritive-value food like grass.
As one clever poster correctly pointed out, the system we use to digest grass is called cows.
I’m not a zoologist (and I’d welcome correction from anyone who is), but it seems to me that grass and more generally plant leaves are a seriously under-utilized resource, not just by humans but in general. There aren’t all that many birds I can think of that subsist off grazing (geese do, as does the Hoatzin, and to some extent ducks) and there aren’t huge proportion of folivorous / algivorous fish (although tilapia would qualify, so would carp, parrotfish, etc.). It does seem to be the case that leaves are just not a great energy source in general, and animals tend to gravitate to more nutritious tissues like seeds, fruits or tubers. Eating leaves requires some special adaptations.
That said, these are vague impressions and I’d welcome more examples of folivorous birds and fishes.
Let’s just say, you need to do more research. Grasslands support a vast fauna, from bison to mice. Remember that grass is a very specialized kind of plant, and lumping grass with all other plants is just sloppy and won’t further your knowledge of anything.
Carnivores mostly eat herbivores. There are at least ten times the number of herbivores than there are carnivores (this is due to basic physics of metabolism). What are those herbivores eating, one wonders. In grasslands, they are eating a lot of grass.
I’m not a zoologist either. You don’t have to be a professional to have a broad sense of how the living world works.
I liked it better this way