Or they need it that way to learn kung-fu
Comment on *confused flatfish noises*
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 3 days agoPandas are descendants of omnivores with a predator streak, them rat fucking their diet to near koala levels of bad doesn’t really factor in yet.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 days ago
Fedizen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Idk if “descendants of omnivores” counts because then you could exclude a number of critters like pigs for being “descendants of herbivores” and then ‘why do pugs have forward facing eyes?’
The obvious caveat is that pandas at the minimum don’t have selective pressure for side eyes or they have something pressuring stereoscopic vision even more similar to how aquatic animals have less selective pressure for forward facing eyes.
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I was trying to imply that pandas did it recently enough for such pressures to not have kicked in yet. Probably should’ve specified that a bit better.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 19 minutes ago
Google tells me that pandas started eating bamboo 6-8 million years ago and stopped eating meat 3 million years ago.
That’s not exactly recent.
For reference, the first Homo appeared 2.8 million years ago and the first Homo Sapiens 300 000 years ago.
The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived 5-10 million years ago.
So if evolution can evolve humans in that time frame, you’d expect that it could also adapt an omnivour to a herbivour.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s the speculation on gut length in pandas based on statistical methods but panda teeth are already well adapted to eat bamboo so selection has been working on them for some time or at least there is no opposing selection at work in panda teeth preventing them from changing. Strangly the large canines are used to cut the bamboo which might be what created their niche in the first place.
Its been a while since I dove into this but from what I remember the speculation with gut length has to do with metabolic tradeoff. If pandas don’t get that tradeoff with the food they eat then they’ll probably keep their current gut length.