We Owe It All to Figs
nautil.us
We Owe It All to Figs: When you bite into an apple, you bite into thousands of years of interactions between these fruits and primates.

A forest can walk across a landscape in the gut of a primate, traveling one defecation at a time.

Many but not all chimpanzee communities use sticks to eat ants. Others use sticks to eat termites. Many use sticks to access honey. Some use sticks to kill and eat bush babies. Bush babies are small, big-eyed, nocturnal primates with adorable little hands that look, yes, like furry babies living up and among the trees. Some chimpanzees love to eat them. Other chimpanzee populations use sticks to gather and eat algae.

  • pipes@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    6 days ago

    Fascinating, thanks for sharing :) I’m greatly enjoying the figs this time of year, not long ago I started eating them unpeeled, they taste even better. Plus more fiber yay!

    It is these gut microbes that convert the fiber in figs into energy. Chilcas, we can infer, depended upon their gut microbes to help them digest their food. They depended on their microbes to help defend them against pathogens. Such microbes helped to keep them alive, and so one might say that they also help to keep the figs around.

    Homo sapiens sapiens still works exactly the same way. A common misconception is that (vegetable) fiber doesn’t give us energy; not true, our gut flora breaks it down into all sorts of short chains that are consumed for example by our own enteric cells, therefore consuming less of other macronutrients.

    • Bonus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      Thank you. I just found this c/ and it reminds me of what Reddit was at the start, interesting stories you’d vouch for because you actually read it.

      (Oops, forgetting which instances I’m on)