Mammals have evolved into ant eaters 12 times since the dinosaur age – study (2025)
phys.orgThis makes sense. The biomass of ants is enormous. It's about 10% of all present livestock on earth. It's a huge source of energy and protein.
So, it stands to reason evolution took animals down the path of taking advantage of that source several times.
As a person who is uneducated on this, I’ve always wondered if it isn’t also something to do with large objects that have collided into in the past .. these things would essentially wipe out most everything on the ground planet and force things to re-evolve again and that is why we see similar patterns .. like Carcinisation [0]
It's not asteroid extinction that's causing convergent evolution. All those crabs, anteaters and trees still exist. They're simply very effective forms.
It's strange to think we chose to hunt or raise large animals; and to perform all that such a choice implies i.e. growing plants to feed them and more generally farming, when we could just raise ants and plants.
Well most large animals we raise or hunt either eat 95% grass and green foliage or eat rotten scrap food that we won't eat. Large herbivores also shit out fertilizer we need for growing human edible crops, and many crops we can grow to feed such animals produce even more fertilizer within their root systems, like alfalfa.
It is also much easier to capture and butcher a cow than the equivalent mass/protein of ants.
It's not strange at all. We grow what we eat, humans didn't start by eating insects. Plus growing plants specifically to feed livestock is an extremely recent development.
Plus ants can't provide all the nutrients we need.
Humans eat insects, current and past
Much like dogs eat grass.
Not really. Go outside into the woods and try and generate sufficient biomass to feed yourself off ants. You can't do it. You will starve before you figure out a solution. Or, you chuck that stick at that 200lb deer and you now have like 100,000 calories worth of venison to live off of.
Animals are expert foragers. A deer can get to 200lbs or more eating what a deer tends to eat just fine. You will struggle to forage like a deer in that same environment, but you can coopt the deer's superior foraging abilities by simply eating it. And if you have a herd of animals you shepherd, not only are they making use of biomass you can't yourself make use off, but they are acting as a store of biomass keeping it fresh and available until you decide to cull some of the herd.
There's a pretty wide gap between 'eats insects' and 'eats only insects.' Other primates eat ants, and there are human cultures where ants and other insects are routinely eaten. Other food may also be involved. Hunting large animals doesn't preclude eating other things. HUmans will eat anything they can get into their pie-hole.
This is true, but we are still better adapted to take up a stick and take down that deer than we are to come up with an ant farming system off the cuff that will generate calories at the same rate. That is all I was suggesting to the point of "why do we eat large animals." It is advantageous to do so is the reason. We are not the only animals to eat other large animals after all.
Hunter-gatherer societies got a lot of calories from seeds and nuts, which are about the same calorie content as insects, and we did come up with a farming system for them.
Except, as a rule, Jews, Muslims, and some Hindus.
In evolutionary terms, that's a pretty recent development.
> Go outside into the woods
I think I can live off just the fire ants in my yard. Not to mention all the neighbors. Even with constantly baiting them, it's hard not have at least 1 hill active at all times during the summer, as the neighbors are dumb and just spray. So they just end up moving.
In other terms, the most populous, widespread, and consistently available plant-eater makes for an ideal carnivore target.
Long after humans spread out across the stars, maybe the perfect human consuming predator will emerge.
> Long after humans spread out across the stars, maybe the perfect human consuming predator will emerge.
It already emerged. Corporations.
> It already emerged. Corporations.
It's more like people are corporations' gut bacteria that are always in dire health because the organism loves junk food of all kinds so much and sometimes is doing drugs too.
except for the fact that while evolving towards eating ants is inevitatable, then something? happens and extinction follows, This disscussion troubling, and others like it are exclusivly about trying to sell the advantage to eating bugs as some good and natural optimisation couched interms like efficiency, but ignore the nastyness of eating bugs, and the very strong likelyhood of our devolution and extinction in the long run. The ants remain, where did those 12 species go? is the important lesson.
"Ants are great if you're really hungry and want two thousand of something."
- Mitch Hedburg
The OG quote by him is about rice. Nevertheless, very funny!
"I used to evolve into an anteater, I still do, but I used to too"
Source: YouTube https://share.google/XA0msyff8lybu47FK
"Expert Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters" -The Onion
Sounds similar to the multiple evolution paths to crabs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Another interesting fact I learned from HN:
“Two randomly selected trees are not likely to be more closely related than any two other randomly selected plants. They're not a family but rather a strategy that evolution has rediscovered several times separately."
Ant eating crabs when??
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44599334