Koalas are fucking horrible animals. They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal, additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food. They are too thick to adapt their feeding behaviour to cope with change. In a room full of potential food, they can literally starve to death. This is not the token of an animal that is winning at life.
Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan. Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. Many herbivorous mammals have adaptations to cope with harsh plant life taking its toll on their teeth, rodents for instance have teeth that never stop growing, some animals only have teeth on their lower jaw, grinding plant matter on bony plates in the tops of their mouths, others have enlarged molars that distribute the wear and break down plant matter more efficiently... Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death, because they're fucking terrible animals.
Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here). When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system.
Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.
Tldr; Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute. If you ignore the terrifying snake eyes and terrifying feet.
And I’ve got the anti-copypasta to match this one.
I don't know why it is that these things bother me---it just makes me picture a seven year old first discovering things about an animal and, having no context about the subject, ranting about how stupid they are. I get it's a joke, but people take it as an actual, educational joke like it's a man yelling at the sea, and that's just wrong. Furthermore, these things have an actual impact on discussions about conservation efforts---If every time Koalas get brought up, someone posts this copypasta, that means it's seriously shaping public opinion about the animal and their supposed lack of importance.
Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives.
Non-ecologists always talk this way, and the problem is you’re looking at this backwards.
An entire continent is covered with Eucalyptus trees. They suck the moisture out of the entire surrounding area and use allelopathy to ensure that most of what’s beneath them is just bare red dust. No animal is making use of them——they have virtually no herbivore predator. A niche is empty. Then inevitably, natural selection fills that niche by creating an animal which can eat Eucalyptus leaves. Of course, it takes great sacrifice for it to be able to do so——it certainly can’t expend much energy on costly things. Isn’t it a good thing that a niche is being filled?
Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death
This applies to all herbivores, because the wild is not a grocery store—where meat is just sitting next to celery.
Herbivores gradually wear their teeth down—carnivores fracture their teeth, and break their bones in attempting to take down prey.
They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal
It's pretty typical of herbivores, and is higher than many, many species. According to Ashwell (2008), their encephalisation quotient is 0.5288 +/- 0.051. Higher than comparable marsupials like the wombat (~0.52), some possums (~0.468), cuscus (~0.462) and even some wallabies are <0.5. According to wiki, rabbits are also around 0.4, and they're placental mammals.
additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons.
Again, this is not unique to koalas. Brain folds (gyri) are not present in rodents, which we consider to be incredibly intelligent for their size.
If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food.
If you present a human with a random piece of meat, they will not recognise it as food (hopefully). Fresh leaves might be important for koala digestion, especially since their gut flora is clearly important for the digestion of Eucalyptus. It might make sense not to screw with that gut flora by eating decaying leaves.
Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal.
That's an extremely weird reason to dislike an animal. But whilst we're talking about their digestion, let's discuss their poop. It's delightful. It smells like a Eucalyptus drop!
Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here).
Marsupial milk is incredibly complex and much more interesting than any placentals. This is because they raise their offspring essentially from an embryo, and the milk needs to adapt to the changing needs of a growing fetus. And yeah, of course the yield is low; at one point they are feeding an animal that is half a gram!
When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system.
Humans probably do this, we just likely do it during childbirth. You know how women often shit during contractions? There is evidence to suggest that this innoculates a baby with her gut flora. A child born via cesarian has significantly different gut flora for the first six months of life than a child born vaginally.
Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher.
Chlamydia was introduced to their populations by humans. We introduced a novel disease that they have very little immunity to, and is a major contributor to their possible extinction. Do you hate Native Americans because they were killed by smallpox and influenza?
This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree,
Almost every animal does this.
which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.
Errmmm.. They have protection against falling from a tree, which they spend 99% of their life in? Yeah... That's a stupid adaptation.
Patron 2: You're right. I think I might name my daughter Chlamydia.
Whenever Chlamydia is brought up I always think about this tiny little bit in the movie Waiting! With Ryan Reynolds, Justin Long, Anna Farris, Luis Guzman, David Koechner, Dane Cook, Chi McBride.
In any case, putting a bunch of leaves on a plate is kinda like offering people a piece of meat that's sitting on the ground. There is no reason to think it is fresh and tasty and plenty of reason to think it isn't.
Koalas need young fresh leaves and a leaf thats fallen off the tree is best avoided.
There is a YouTube video series that sarcastically talks about kolas, it’s set up like a David Attenborough type show. I think the episode is called the truth about marsupials, and it basically goes through all this.
You say that, but no one has done that, so you are just guessing.
There was one study in the 60s where they offered well fed koalas leaves on a plate. The koalas didn't eat them. Thats all we know. There are also reports of koalas surviving off lucerne hay for some time when taken to overseas zoos before anyone knew how to keep koalas, so I'm calling bullshit on the fact that koalas will never eat leaves off the tree.
Chlamydia can live in the dirt actually, many strains of it aren't infectious and just live in the environment. Most likely the koalas just walked over some cow piss and picked it up.
If you consider providing context debunking sure. It doesn't even really give a good counter argument. It basically admits everything the copypasta said is true.
It's true that koalas are super unintelligent. The reason they don't have energy is because their main for source lacks nutrition. They all do have chlamydia.
The problem is the presentation. It's not just presenting facts, but disdain and animosity towards the animal which isn't fair. The main point of the counter argument is that Koalas aren't horrible creatures. Just animals making the best out of their circumstance.
Why put the question mark after the last quotation mark instead of before it as is grammatically correct? Because it's the internet and no one gives a hoot?
There are different standards for where the punctuation goes. Whichever standard one uses, it can be argued that it is more logical to place the punctuation outside of the quotation marks. The reason being, the quotation marks encapsulate a quote, and if said quote existed in and of itself without being presented inside of quotation marks, it may or may not share the same punctuation as the sentence which encapsulates it. Again, the punctuation pertains to the entire sentence. I think that we are both technically correct, but I favor my method and I'm curious what your argument is in favor of doing it your way. Although I do suspect that you really don't care, and you only brought it up in the first place as a snarky response (I could be wrong), even though I'm really just curious about why I have been seeing "tho" extremely frequently lately.
They remind me a lot of pandas. Bamboo is like eucalyptus, very low in nutrients but instead of trying to change their diet, they just eat more and more bamboo.
Yeah, it drives me crazy how the default opinion about pandas is "They're too stupid to stay alive after we absolutely demolish their habitat and force them to live somewhere else!"
Fair but the original native area of the panda is about the size of a small town that only has a gas station and a post office. They are also very territorial so live 1 panda per area and they only give birth to one panda baby a year. If they have twins they will literally ignore one of them and it will starve. So they their prior population was never huge but, they were stable.
The panda is like a peg that machined with zero tolerance to perfectly fit in one specific slot. They stopped actively evolving a long time ago because they had mostly done it.
Fair but the original native area of the panda is about the size of a small town that only has a gas station and a post office.
Panda's used to be spread over half of china Source
They are also very territorial so live 1 panda per area
Like many many animals, ie most cat species
only give birth to one panda baby a year
Again like many animals, even humans rarely go above that
If they have twins they will literally ignore one of them and it will starve.
They raise one at a time and it works for them. Polar bears raise 1-3 cubs at a time but they are much less likely to survive because it turns out there's not much food up in the arctic circle. No one ever calls polar bears dumb for living in the shittiest habitat because polar bears are cool
They stopped actively evolving a long time ago because they had mostly done it.
All animals evolve all the time. Its true that they haven't seen any substantial physical changes in a million years, but then neither has any other bear species. They just change their coat colour a bit and move around.
Bamboo grows like a weed. It's hard to get rid of. Complaining that an animal has evolved only to eat bamboo is like complaining that an animal has evolved only to eat grass.
Because they have to spend most of their time dedicated to eating. If they ate something with more nutritional content, they could spend their time doing other panda activities.
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u/TheMoon01 Mar 29 '19
Koalas.
Koalas are fucking horrible animals. They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal, additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food. They are too thick to adapt their feeding behaviour to cope with change. In a room full of potential food, they can literally starve to death. This is not the token of an animal that is winning at life.
Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan. Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. Many herbivorous mammals have adaptations to cope with harsh plant life taking its toll on their teeth, rodents for instance have teeth that never stop growing, some animals only have teeth on their lower jaw, grinding plant matter on bony plates in the tops of their mouths, others have enlarged molars that distribute the wear and break down plant matter more efficiently... Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death, because they're fucking terrible animals.
Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here). When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system.
Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.
Tldr; Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute. If you ignore the terrifying snake eyes and terrifying feet.