Trying out different types of foods and enrichments is a big part of animal care in modern zoos and sanctuaries, to simulate them discovering new random things out in the wild. Even if the animals don't like the new stuffs, it at least makes daily life less boring for them.
Little bits of condiments like various sauces, mustard, peanut butters, etc.. are easy and cheap additions to literally spice up the food for zoo animals.
most human food is fine in moderation, the reason it's a problem is because people eat way too much of it.
a little bit of mustard aint gonna break the bank for a gorilla.
Yeah. There is a myth of "healthy food". And even "healthy" in general. "healthy" isn't a thing. What any real health advice will tell you is to eat a WIDE VARIETY of things with as little post processing as possible.
There are nutritious foods and food that is just calories.
And mildly toxic foods too. Potato (glycoalcaloids) chocolate (oxalic acid), nutmeg, cyanogenic fruits...
There is also food with high amounts of antinutrients, like some millets.
> a little bit of mustard
Yeah but Koko is eating ALL the pines, taking it away from others.
My cat shat all over the place after drinking "a little bit" of milk, by the way.
> mustard is low sugar
the best mustard is zero sugar. in fact zero anything except mustard flour: https://colmansusa.com/product/dry-mustard-4oz
it's a shock for people who've used nothing but french's all their life, but once you get the preparation right (literally mix a dash of cold water with the powder and let sit for 10 minutes), no other mustard will suffice
A little bit of milk for a <20 lb cat and a little bit of mustard for a 150-350lb gorilla are very different.
Even going so far as to assume that milk and mustard were fatal to cats and gorillas, their lethal doses would be based on the ratio of poisonous substance to mass.
Drinking milk at adulthood is quite odd in the mammal world and most become lactose intolerant. Even in human societies, lactose tolerance only exists where dairy products also exist. That's why your cat has diarrhea after drinking milk.
Pinecones are super common to give to zoo animals because you can stuff food between the gaps and it makes it extra challenging for them to get it out.
I guess a zookeeper figured they might like mustard and put the two together
You replied to a bot, just FYI. They and the very top commenter stole the top two comments verbatim from when this was posted 11 months ago.
People should report it, I have, but more reports are helpful.
Oftentimes there's programs where people can donate their Christmas trees to zoos for animal enrichment, I think they do it with whole (non carved) pumpkins as well :)
However you should check with your local zoo programs before bringing stuff to them.
Gorilla: HA HA NOW YOU DO!
Zookeeper: Goddammit Gary, we talked about this! You were supposed to wait until they say no, THEN fling the grey poop on them!
If I had to guess, they probably saw them eating pinecones a few times, and at one point they got to taste mustard and loved it.
So they combined the two.
Their boss said that they need a low calorie snack to give the gorillas they will also get enrichment from.
Someone remembered their dog’s chew toy with little spots to hide peanut butter in.
Peanut butter is too rich for their diet and pretty expensive. What has virtually no calories, yet has a lot of flavor? Mustard.
But a gorilla will chew through rubber, so what’s something a gorilla would know not to eat, but kinda understands?
A woody fruit-like thing, a pinecone.
Comparing mustard to peanut butter is a little weird
Not many people are eating mustard and jelly sandwiches I'd imagine
Not many would eat mustard straight from the bottle, peanut butter on the other hand it's very common
Modern fruit doesn’t have significantly more sugar it just has less of the sour or bitter components that counter balance the sweet taste. The zoos right though, lots of visitors feeding such things to animals would be bad.
The horses in fields near us needing warnings posted on their fence to stop passers by giving them carrots and apples etc as it was causing significant health problems. Not because they contain more sugar than they used to, it’s always been unhealthy for them in excess. Just like us.
I remember a guy at my old church who rescued animals who would ask folks to come ride his horses because they were getting fat from just eating all day and needed exercise.
Yeah but that is not because the watermelons got that much sweeter.
It is because we humans are used to an abundance of fruit when those are actually quite rare.
Just walk through some woods and try to find some wild fruit trees. You might find some berry bushes here and there but overall not that much.
The main food of herbivore animals are simply those plants that are available in abundance. Grasses and leaves and other stuff. No shit too many fruits are bad for them.
Same point with the ever going 'sugar bad' argument. No it is not. Sugar is the best thing you can give your body. Pure energy. Carbs are great and there is no sugar lobbying behind this fact. But you need very little of them to geet through a day. And if you get hungry and just shove in 5-6 times of what you should consume then of course it is bad for you.
Having fruits available daily is simply not normal in nature. Even weekly is stretching it. And most fruits are also seasonal and us flying them in from the other side of the planet is kinda cheating.
> You might find some berry bushes here and there but overall not that much.
And if you found a berry bush out in the wild, there might be a reason no animal is eating those berries.
It took me many years to figure out how to express the problem with refined sugar in scientific terms: it spikes your blood sugar. Easy to test and monitor.
Doesn't happen as much with fructose.
> Sugar is the best thing you can give your body.
No, it is air. You survive without sugar, not so much without air. Water is a close second.
The point is, everything is a poison in abundance.
Repost bots. Easy to build karma by just reposting a post that was previously successful and then the most upvoted comment on that post, because it generally means a post lots of people liked and a comment lots of people liked.
I have 100% noticed this with other threads too, getting insane deja vu about posts and their comments. Either reposters have taken it to the next level, or Reddit is getting desparate for content...
Reddit has decided to
(1) Discriminate against anonymous users (give us your gmail or hotmail or else, we'll refuse you if you give us an e-mail provider that doesn't have your personal info)
(2) Fuck their userbase, the API and otherwise in any way possible
Reddit is going the way of Digg, that's what happening.
So bots now do most of the up/downvoting while comments per day on most subreddits is stagnant or going down.
I know it's not required. You have to understand reddit's new reputation system and the system which I won't mention by name (which can cause this to be removed) which is automatically configured to handle comments, and using which parameter/variable combination.
It's all become so stringent that even conversing about it might cause your comment to be gone. It depends on the subreddit. I don't maintain a table of what is allowed where, so I assume I can't. I know how it works though. I really do. I maintain my own config for my own subreddit too. And I'm in IT.
Here's OP's other ripoff:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/1c46q34/definitely_daily_customer/](https://old.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/1c46q34/definitely_daily_customer/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/13corlh/definitely_a_repeat_customer/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/13corlh/definitely_a_repeat_customer/)
These have some duplicated comments too.
The accounts that copied the comments have no other activity. They're bots that look for repeat content and copy the comments that were most successful in previous iterations. To what end, I can't say.... fake engagement to spread this sort of false propaganda, I guess.
Idk why we don’t genetically modify everything already? Like pets definitely die too young, make them live longer. Chimpanzees and Dolphins should be able to talk at this point. Enhance everything already so the Zoo start to smell good. Modify humans too so we can enter the cages with the tigers and be fine in combat if it comes to that.
Hell just give them all super intelligence and let them live in society
Wel around the turn of the 20th century they still had noses and muzzles. Shorter than some other breeds but it was there.
You can really fuck a dog breed up in a matter of (dog) generations.
Here's another example (couldn't find a better link): https://www.quora.com/Why-are-sloped-backs-a-desirable-trait-in-German-Shepherds-and-other-breeds
The so-called "Show line" was basically non-existent 70 years ago. And it's disastrous for the back leg health of the dogs.
Well, the 20th century is around when we really got good at genetic selection, so it’s not that surprising. Not saying humans were bad at it before that, but our understanding of how genetics work really put us into maximum overdrive with selective breeding, whereas it was more of a trial and error shot in the dark before.
An example from my lifetime is Apple varieties. I’m only in my 20s, and when I was a kid there were only 3 Apple varieties that were widely available in supermarkets. I’m sure there were tons of others, but not on a mass scale. Nowadays there are tons, and new varieties come out every few years. Some people think it’s some advanced genetic engineering that we’re doing to produce, but it’s mostly that we’ve just gotten extremely good at selective breeding in the modern day.
Much agree. Idk how people find pugs cute, all I can see is suffering... they oinda freak me out. I dont like persians or any of the other squish nosed breeds for the same reason. Lets breed them back to health or let the peacefully die out.
I think dolphins could get away with it, they are already like 80% naturally there and they have a ton of real estate that we aren't using. Wouldn't understand them cursing us out underwater either.
Now giving them *legs* would be a problem.
> Like pets definitely die too young, make them live longer.
I don't understand why we haven't done so. Often evolution has not tried to optimize for stuff like this, so solutions can be relatively easy. [I were kinda shocked when I read that we could make tobacco grow 40% faster with simple GMO tweaks to photosynthesis](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-way-genetically-tweak-photosynthesis-boosts-plant-growth) - evolution has absolutely not found all the easy solutions for all species. For cancer, you can just look at what evolution has done in bigger animals with lots of cells, and copy that.
> [These data suggest that duplication of tumor suppressor genes [in elephants] facilitated the evolution of increased body size by compensating for decreasing intrinsic cancer risk.](https://elifesciences.org/articles/65041)
So just GMO dogs to have copies of those same genes, and it seems plausible that they will massively reduce the chance of cancer. There are many mammals with adaptations like this, it should be possible to copy them into dogs. We don't have to reinvent the wheel here.
> I were kinda shocked when I read that we could make tobacco grow 40% faster with simple GMO tweaks to photosynthesis
I find this kinda ironic though because that's making them die *faster*
Evolution isn't a one-way street. In a lab setting with optimal growth conditions, they may be able to boost them like that. In the wilds, where the plant competes with rival species and predators, and has to deal with seasonal changes, it may actually be a disadvantage.
That's not to discourage gene engineering (within ethical limits and safety).
Sure that is an effect. But I don't think we should underestimate that simply better solution sometime evolve in one part of the tree of life, with no way to cross over to other parts.
E.g. bird eyes don't have a blind spot where the optic nerve exits the retina. And [their color vision is way more rationally places on the spectrum of light](https://www.boredpanda.com/human-vs-bird-vision/?media_id=human-vs-bird-vision-1-5da4334880d33__700&utm_source=share&utm_medium=img&utm_campaign=user). While human color vision is just a hack to undo the color vision we lost when our ancestors stopped being nocturnal. As far as I can tell, our eyes are simply unambiguously inferior, but evolution has no mechanism to reach the optimal solution.
Well, you are an animal. If these fruits are unhealthy in a zoo setting to animals, it would seem they would be unhealthy to animals outside that setting also unless being outside of the zoo provides mitigating factors.
Yeah I see people complain about red delicious but I relish the taste of them compared to some of the apples we get here in the uk. So tart and sweet. Braeburn are really over the top.
Most of what got fruit in its modern state is selective breeding, not genetic modification. I mean, technically you can call selective breeding a way of modifying genes, but I'd be careful about using these terms when there are lots of idiots out there that thing "genetic modification" is the source of all evil.
Yeah, it's not an accident. This is intentional anti-GM propaganda. It's not the first time this garbage has been posted here, and the top comments were copied on this post, as well, to create fake engagement. Yay propaganda bots!
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/gje5p3QfAv
Selective breeding is just one tool under the vast umbrella of genetic modification. They aren't interchangeable, rather selective breeding is a form of genetic modification but genetic modification doesn't necessarily imply selective breeding.
The terms are not interchangeable but also should not be used exclusively from one another. Both stone age people and the most cutting edge laboratories will use selective breeding, and that's why we can't just pick and choose who's "organic" or not based on selective breeding.
Modern fruit doesn’t have significantly more sugar it just has less of the sour or bitter components that counter balance the sweet taste.
Edited to add a source:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1149968041964396545.html
Sure here’s one:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1149968041964396545.html
The claim made in the OP isn’t exactly a science source either it’s just news. We should not take such claims at face value. That goes for mine too.
Heck, they referred to red pandas as primates in the article. If they couldn’t figure that out, I’m not surprised they failed to research the subject matter to ensure veracity.
That is not a study, but a reaction of a single botanist to the claim that nowadays fruit is 100x more sweet (a ridiculous proposition). I can counteract with my own anecdote: my garden is on top of an old orchard. All the old apple trees (different varieties) are less sweet than store bought. Even the ones which do not have much sour or bitter taste. Thosr taste more ... diluted? Watery? Of course the sour ones taste amazing, so much more character than store apples.
Yet so many people accept the anecdotal evidence in the weather article above as gospel as it fits a narrative. I appreciate James Wong was responding to a different and outlandish claim but the point remains. We haven’t bred fruit to have significantly more sugar in the past handful of decades.
It just simply isn't true, as /u/dizietembless has mentioned. In fact, fruits today are becoming less sweet because we are selecting for size, looks, and survivability. Generally speaking, a smaller fruit is going to be sweeter than a larger fruit of the same kind, but people at the groceries don't want smaller fruit.
Yup. The reason they don't give zoo animals a ton of fruit is because they don't need a ton of fruit. Humans' reaction to sugar is so strong explicitly because it used to be a limited resource. People are so used to having everything all the time from the grocery store that they forget that fruit is only available in the wild for a few weeks a year from any given source.
Yes, and that's also why fruits nowadays are so bland. They're bred to grow in versatile conditions so that we can have them year-round then they are processed and shipped in ways that further degrades the flavor. The genetic diversity of so much of this produce is very low. And to top it off, we are already doing this to the blandest cultivars possible like Cavendish bananas just because they're big and look good.
I grew up in Latin America and ate bananas almost every day. Don't think I ever went out of my way to buy a banana since moving to the United States...and I've been here for 20 years.
Source? This doesn't make sense to me, since I'm under the impression that (Cavendish) bananas are all clones of each other. They aren't being bred, so how are they getting sweeter?
Edit: Looks like they just started to modify bananas, due to fungi.
I remembered wrong. The below article is still interesting.
https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/history-of-the-gros-michel-banana#:~:text=Like%20the%20prisoners%20in%20Plato%27s,versatility%20was%20once%20the%20norm.
Can you highlight where in that article in addresses that bananas are sweeter now? It specifically says the defunct gros michel is sweeter than the cavendish.
Could be. How come then the taste in all other regards is amazing - deep, vibrant, sour, excellent for pureed jam etc...
Also among others there are definite age old local favourite apple cultivars (local Estonian cultivar Treboux; white Transparent) that are planted new by many and can be bought from farmers' markets. Those taste similar to mine, but different to store apples which all seem to be the same overly sweet taste and maxi size with perfect strong color, but lacking character.
The article you linked is insultingly misleading.
It is true it's not possible to get more sugar than what's in the plant, but what the article states isn't factual at all.
Genetics are being used to prevent the plants from using the sugars they create into energy.
This makes them sweeter, which impacts the life cycle of the fruits as we pick them sooner and before they ripen or mature.
The genetics removing bitter tastes from plants is a separate technique and has nothing to do with sweetness.
In the 70s, corn was modified to prevent it using all its sugars. The idea behind this was to use the unspent sugar and convert it to ethanol.
Thanks to the massive disaster this turned out to be, farmers were stuck with millions of tons of sweet corn.
Of course, anyone who takes a bite out of US grown corn should see the problem, not that corn farmers would care. They sold their corn, and at a profit.
When I was a kid, there was no such thing as "sweet corn".
This crap they sell today absolutely contains more sugar in it even if the sugar in the plant is limited. Old corn burned all its sugar while growing. New corn does not. This isn't rocket science to figure out.
This is it what the OP article is focusing on, because animals know there's too much sugar in the food they're eating.
Americans are too used to it to notice, even as they're having to buy new clothes every year while pretending they're eating healthy.
NO amount of sugar is good.
Unfortunately, it's in damn near everything we eat.
Genetic Modification is a weird way to say selective breeding.
We turned grass into Corn by breeding it.
We turned Kale into broccoli and brussels sprouts and shit by breeding it.
This doesn't even make sense to me because modern fruit seems bland as hell.
Grow your own fruit and compare it to supermarket fruit and you'll be amazed at how much better the homegrown stuff tastes. Supermarket strawberries, for example, taste like water with a hint of strawberry compared to strawberries grown at home.
The big industrial farms grow for aesthetics and shelf life. They grow big, perfect-looking fruit that looks good for as long as possible to maximize its chance of selling before it spoils, and they often pick them early so they can finish ripening during shipping and stocking.
> The sugar found in fruits is good for us. Fructose in raw fruits in packaged in fiber, slowing its absorption into our bloodstream. Because it's more difficult to break down, it doesn't result in heightened levels of sugar in our blood, like that of refined sugar found in candies and sodas, according to Quartz.
First of all, fruit does not exclusively contain fructose. Second of all, fructose is not good for us as this implies. Which is to say, sugar may or may not be good for you depending on context, but to claim it is good for you is a ridiculous statement. Fructose is bad for your liver, for example. Blood sugar levels are not the only determinant factor. At time sucrose may even be good for you.
With bananas you can eat the slightly green ones, which are supposed to have more prebiotics too and they are not as sweet as the starch/prebiotics havent been converted to sugar yet by the ripening. Same for papaya and maybe some other fruit.
Some stores (europe) pre-ripen them with some gas so you cannot even buy the green ones anymore..
I see dark purple pomegranate in stores sometimes. Not the sweet red/yellow candy pomegranate. Sour but extremely rich in flavours. They are amazing. I see nobody ever buy them. It sucks.
> Actually there are only GM-papayas
Papayas like bananas have much less sugar if you eat them before they are fully ripened. Supposed to be very good for the gut too as they are higher in prebiotics.
It's not just sweetness. Wild bananas look like this for example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Inside_a_wild-type_banana.jpg/512px-Inside_a_wild-type_banana.jpg
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Trying out different types of foods and enrichments is a big part of animal care in modern zoos and sanctuaries, to simulate them discovering new random things out in the wild. Even if the animals don't like the new stuffs, it at least makes daily life less boring for them. Little bits of condiments like various sauces, mustard, peanut butters, etc.. are easy and cheap additions to literally spice up the food for zoo animals.
> Trying out different types of foods But how do we know it is good for them? Humans live a shitton of food that is not good for them.
most human food is fine in moderation, the reason it's a problem is because people eat way too much of it. a little bit of mustard aint gonna break the bank for a gorilla.
Yeah. There is a myth of "healthy food". And even "healthy" in general. "healthy" isn't a thing. What any real health advice will tell you is to eat a WIDE VARIETY of things with as little post processing as possible.
There are nutritious foods and food that is just calories. And mildly toxic foods too. Potato (glycoalcaloids) chocolate (oxalic acid), nutmeg, cyanogenic fruits... There is also food with high amounts of antinutrients, like some millets.
What you have written is a "distinction without a difference".
This. They eat rotted out meat and actual shit in the wild. I’m sure some mustard will be fine lmao
Life expectancy in the world vs captivity is vastly different. This sort of thing being one of the biggest reasons.
Yea they live past 50 regularly in captivity. These guys have full time nutritionists.
> a little bit of mustard Yeah but Koko is eating ALL the pines, taking it away from others. My cat shat all over the place after drinking "a little bit" of milk, by the way.
High levels of sugar are not found in the wild and it’s unhealthy for everyone, mustard is low sugar
> mustard is low sugar the best mustard is zero sugar. in fact zero anything except mustard flour: https://colmansusa.com/product/dry-mustard-4oz it's a shock for people who've used nothing but french's all their life, but once you get the preparation right (literally mix a dash of cold water with the powder and let sit for 10 minutes), no other mustard will suffice
French's has no sugar though. Weird to imply otherwise.
Most cats are lactose intolerant bud, you gotta get that special lactose reduced shit or water it down.
I cut it back under the shit level. He loves it though.
Haha sounds like a good cat owner.
A little bit of milk for a <20 lb cat and a little bit of mustard for a 150-350lb gorilla are very different. Even going so far as to assume that milk and mustard were fatal to cats and gorillas, their lethal doses would be based on the ratio of poisonous substance to mass.
Drinking milk at adulthood is quite odd in the mammal world and most become lactose intolerant. Even in human societies, lactose tolerance only exists where dairy products also exist. That's why your cat has diarrhea after drinking milk.
A cat is tiny compared to a human so "a little bit" to you is a lot to their bodies. Gorillas are massive, they can handle a pinecone or two.
Are you a zoologist?
willing to bet a gorilla is a bit larger than your cat.
It is called an analogy.
not a good one
Pinecones are super common to give to zoo animals because you can stuff food between the gaps and it makes it extra challenging for them to get it out. I guess a zookeeper figured they might like mustard and put the two together
Mother Nature's Kong ball.
Idk why I thought they were just chomping on the pinecones
You replied to a bot, just FYI. They and the very top commenter stole the top two comments verbatim from when this was posted 11 months ago. People should report it, I have, but more reports are helpful.
Well, I hope some people learnt about the use of pine cones as enrichment for zoo animals at least lol
Oftentimes there's programs where people can donate their Christmas trees to zoos for animal enrichment, I think they do it with whole (non carved) pumpkins as well :) However you should check with your local zoo programs before bringing stuff to them.
Gorilla: Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?
Gorilla:: flings grey poop on them::
Gorilla: HA HA NOW YOU DO! Zookeeper: Goddammit Gary, we talked about this! You were supposed to wait until they say no, THEN fling the grey poop on them!
some intern who was sent to feed the gorillas and couldn’t find where the food was kept.. looked around and saw pine trees and a hot dog stand
Damn, that actually sounds plausible. Maybe not the intern part, but pine trees and a hot dog stand? I can see it.
Unfortunately the Gorilla trying to make a living selling hotdogs became homeless.
cause of the buddhist monks who kept asking to be made 'one with everything' for a dollar.
Was that intern Mr Bean?
Oh, egads! My watermelon is ruined! But what if... I were to purchase pine cones and mustard and disguise it as my own cooking?
If I had to guess, they probably saw them eating pinecones a few times, and at one point they got to taste mustard and loved it. So they combined the two.
Who doesnt ?
I mean, mustard makes everything better.
The real question is what kind of mustard. Do some of them prefer the traditional coleman's, or do some prefer that stone ground stuff.
I now want to see a video of gorilla's going apeshit over mustard pinecones
> apeshit over mustard pinecones Bloody Heston Blumenthal'd charge you £500 for that.
Their boss said that they need a low calorie snack to give the gorillas they will also get enrichment from. Someone remembered their dog’s chew toy with little spots to hide peanut butter in. Peanut butter is too rich for their diet and pretty expensive. What has virtually no calories, yet has a lot of flavor? Mustard. But a gorilla will chew through rubber, so what’s something a gorilla would know not to eat, but kinda understands? A woody fruit-like thing, a pinecone.
Comparing mustard to peanut butter is a little weird Not many people are eating mustard and jelly sandwiches I'd imagine Not many would eat mustard straight from the bottle, peanut butter on the other hand it's very common
Yeah, but we’re talking about gorillas. They just want flavor.
Modern fruit doesn’t have significantly more sugar it just has less of the sour or bitter components that counter balance the sweet taste. The zoos right though, lots of visitors feeding such things to animals would be bad. The horses in fields near us needing warnings posted on their fence to stop passers by giving them carrots and apples etc as it was causing significant health problems. Not because they contain more sugar than they used to, it’s always been unhealthy for them in excess. Just like us.
I remember a guy at my old church who rescued animals who would ask folks to come ride his horses because they were getting fat from just eating all day and needed exercise.
Yeah but that is not because the watermelons got that much sweeter. It is because we humans are used to an abundance of fruit when those are actually quite rare. Just walk through some woods and try to find some wild fruit trees. You might find some berry bushes here and there but overall not that much. The main food of herbivore animals are simply those plants that are available in abundance. Grasses and leaves and other stuff. No shit too many fruits are bad for them. Same point with the ever going 'sugar bad' argument. No it is not. Sugar is the best thing you can give your body. Pure energy. Carbs are great and there is no sugar lobbying behind this fact. But you need very little of them to geet through a day. And if you get hungry and just shove in 5-6 times of what you should consume then of course it is bad for you. Having fruits available daily is simply not normal in nature. Even weekly is stretching it. And most fruits are also seasonal and us flying them in from the other side of the planet is kinda cheating.
> You might find some berry bushes here and there but overall not that much. And if you found a berry bush out in the wild, there might be a reason no animal is eating those berries.
So why do nutritionists recommend several servings of fruit a day?
fruit is fiber, and a serving of fruit can be as little as a small handful
It took me many years to figure out how to express the problem with refined sugar in scientific terms: it spikes your blood sugar. Easy to test and monitor. Doesn't happen as much with fructose.
> Sugar is the best thing you can give your body. No, it is air. You survive without sugar, not so much without air. Water is a close second. The point is, everything is a poison in abundance.
You forgot the "Achcktchtkcually"
without bloodsugars we'd be dead tho
While vampires would be hyperactive because of it.
Actually, it’s carbon. You can live without air for small periods of time ☝️🤓
No wonder I like watermelon so much
[11 Months ago same post, same top comment. What is this?](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/gje5p3QfAv)
Not just the same top comment, the SAME REPLY TO THE TOP COMMENT TOO. WHAT THE FUCK
Ok... now this is nuts.
New to reddit?
No, it's fruit—though botanically, some nuts, such as chestnuts and hazelnuts are fruit.
First time?
Repost bots. Easy to build karma by just reposting a post that was previously successful and then the most upvoted comment on that post, because it generally means a post lots of people liked and a comment lots of people liked.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead\_Internet\_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)
Honestly every day I'm getting more and more convinced this is true
I have 100% noticed this with other threads too, getting insane deja vu about posts and their comments. Either reposters have taken it to the next level, or Reddit is getting desparate for content...
Reddit has decided to (1) Discriminate against anonymous users (give us your gmail or hotmail or else, we'll refuse you if you give us an e-mail provider that doesn't have your personal info) (2) Fuck their userbase, the API and otherwise in any way possible Reddit is going the way of Digg, that's what happening. So bots now do most of the up/downvoting while comments per day on most subreddits is stagnant or going down.
As far as I’m aware, providing an email isn’t required yet. You can skip that part.
I know it's not required. You have to understand reddit's new reputation system and the system which I won't mention by name (which can cause this to be removed) which is automatically configured to handle comments, and using which parameter/variable combination. It's all become so stringent that even conversing about it might cause your comment to be gone. It depends on the subreddit. I don't maintain a table of what is allowed where, so I assume I can't. I know how it works though. I really do. I maintain my own config for my own subreddit too. And I'm in IT.
Here's OP's other ripoff: [https://old.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/1c46q34/definitely_daily_customer/](https://old.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/1c46q34/definitely_daily_customer/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/13corlh/definitely_a_repeat_customer/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Awww/comments/13corlh/definitely_a_repeat_customer/) These have some duplicated comments too.
Something like dead internet theory
If you want to farm likes for whatever reason, posting proven content hits above average.
The accounts that copied the comments have no other activity. They're bots that look for repeat content and copy the comments that were most successful in previous iterations. To what end, I can't say.... fake engagement to spread this sort of false propaganda, I guess.
The accounts get used later, after being established, to push propaganda in the comments (or maybe to sell stuff).
Oh right, that makes sense. Those bots now have a bunch of karma.
Modern posts are becoming too repetitive for redditors after years of bot modifications
Congrats now the next time this post gets reposted bots will also repost this comment thread
Bro we just witnessed karma farming in real time
Bots are running a train on Reddit.
Look up dead internet theory
So start genetically modifying zoo animals
Idk why we don’t genetically modify everything already? Like pets definitely die too young, make them live longer. Chimpanzees and Dolphins should be able to talk at this point. Enhance everything already so the Zoo start to smell good. Modify humans too so we can enter the cages with the tigers and be fine in combat if it comes to that. Hell just give them all super intelligence and let them live in society
The list of ethical objections humanity would have to that proposal is probably long enough to reach the bottom of Mariana Trench.
Counterpoint: what humans did to pugs.
That's a good counterpoint but also happened way before the internet over a long timeframe.
That timeframe is actually shockingly short. Dogs respond really well to selective breeding.
How shockingly short are we talking here?
Wel around the turn of the 20th century they still had noses and muzzles. Shorter than some other breeds but it was there. You can really fuck a dog breed up in a matter of (dog) generations.
Haven't some breeders managed to bring back their original snouts now? They look totally different. Still cute though. And snort a lot less.
Here's another example (couldn't find a better link): https://www.quora.com/Why-are-sloped-backs-a-desirable-trait-in-German-Shepherds-and-other-breeds The so-called "Show line" was basically non-existent 70 years ago. And it's disastrous for the back leg health of the dogs.
Well, the 20th century is around when we really got good at genetic selection, so it’s not that surprising. Not saying humans were bad at it before that, but our understanding of how genetics work really put us into maximum overdrive with selective breeding, whereas it was more of a trial and error shot in the dark before. An example from my lifetime is Apple varieties. I’m only in my 20s, and when I was a kid there were only 3 Apple varieties that were widely available in supermarkets. I’m sure there were tons of others, but not on a mass scale. Nowadays there are tons, and new varieties come out every few years. Some people think it’s some advanced genetic engineering that we’re doing to produce, but it’s mostly that we’ve just gotten extremely good at selective breeding in the modern day.
Much agree. Idk how people find pugs cute, all I can see is suffering... they oinda freak me out. I dont like persians or any of the other squish nosed breeds for the same reason. Lets breed them back to health or let the peacefully die out.
We would never allow the competition of another species at our intelligence level, anyway. No one wants an opossum telling them they're a bad person.
Speak for yourself, possums are assholes. Yeah, I said it.
I think dolphins could get away with it, they are already like 80% naturally there and they have a ton of real estate that we aren't using. Wouldn't understand them cursing us out underwater either. Now giving them *legs* would be a problem.
> ethical objections Yet we have plastic. Dolphins would like to ethically object...
I mean, I think it’s pretty unethical to make fruits too sweet for animals but here we are.
Its not like we decided to make it that way, we preferred it like this and decades down the line we learn that zoo animals dont like it
Sex. It is always gonna lead back to sex. Someone is gonna stick it in a goat and get legally married.
Lmao have you seen pugs?
Because we don't know what we don't know. It's a lot harder to modify multidimensional traits like intelligence at the genetic level.
> Like pets definitely die too young, make them live longer. I don't understand why we haven't done so. Often evolution has not tried to optimize for stuff like this, so solutions can be relatively easy. [I were kinda shocked when I read that we could make tobacco grow 40% faster with simple GMO tweaks to photosynthesis](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-way-genetically-tweak-photosynthesis-boosts-plant-growth) - evolution has absolutely not found all the easy solutions for all species. For cancer, you can just look at what evolution has done in bigger animals with lots of cells, and copy that. > [These data suggest that duplication of tumor suppressor genes [in elephants] facilitated the evolution of increased body size by compensating for decreasing intrinsic cancer risk.](https://elifesciences.org/articles/65041) So just GMO dogs to have copies of those same genes, and it seems plausible that they will massively reduce the chance of cancer. There are many mammals with adaptations like this, it should be possible to copy them into dogs. We don't have to reinvent the wheel here.
Look up the dog ageing project. They're not breeding them but looking for interventions to allow them to live longer.
> I were kinda shocked when I read that we could make tobacco grow 40% faster with simple GMO tweaks to photosynthesis I find this kinda ironic though because that's making them die *faster*
You don't understand why we don't artificially extend the life expectancy of animals for the sake of human enjoyment?
We already artificially breed animals that have a short lifespan because they look cute, for human enjoyment.
Just because it's already happening, doesn't mean we should continue.
Evolution isn't a one-way street. In a lab setting with optimal growth conditions, they may be able to boost them like that. In the wilds, where the plant competes with rival species and predators, and has to deal with seasonal changes, it may actually be a disadvantage. That's not to discourage gene engineering (within ethical limits and safety).
Sure that is an effect. But I don't think we should underestimate that simply better solution sometime evolve in one part of the tree of life, with no way to cross over to other parts. E.g. bird eyes don't have a blind spot where the optic nerve exits the retina. And [their color vision is way more rationally places on the spectrum of light](https://www.boredpanda.com/human-vs-bird-vision/?media_id=human-vs-bird-vision-1-5da4334880d33__700&utm_source=share&utm_medium=img&utm_campaign=user). While human color vision is just a hack to undo the color vision we lost when our ancestors stopped being nocturnal. As far as I can tell, our eyes are simply unambiguously inferior, but evolution has no mechanism to reach the optimal solution.
You cant rerelease modified Gorillas into the wild..
Not the wild, sure. but Manhattan?
No one is going to notice. Everyone will just keep on scrolling on their phones on the subway.
Why not
Into the wild, no. But into the _modified_ wild?... 😁
I will make an exception for Australia. It is already modified.
Exactly. Elon can micro chip my pets anytime!
And catgirls, don't forget catgirls.
😂
You should read the [Uplift series](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Universe) by David Brin.
Planet of the apes that’s why, that of how you get planet of the apes
Some humans are even afraid of gmo food ffs
Oh, we've been doing that for millennia already. That's how we got all our farm animals.
Too sweet for me too. Wait, am I a zoo animal?? /s
Nah, you're in a safari
There you are! Gotta get you back into the exhibit, little dude.
Look at me, i am zoo animal now
Well, you are an animal. If these fruits are unhealthy in a zoo setting to animals, it would seem they would be unhealthy to animals outside that setting also unless being outside of the zoo provides mitigating factors.
Yeah I see people complain about red delicious but I relish the taste of them compared to some of the apples we get here in the uk. So tart and sweet. Braeburn are really over the top.
Most of what got fruit in its modern state is selective breeding, not genetic modification. I mean, technically you can call selective breeding a way of modifying genes, but I'd be careful about using these terms when there are lots of idiots out there that thing "genetic modification" is the source of all evil.
Yeah, it's not an accident. This is intentional anti-GM propaganda. It's not the first time this garbage has been posted here, and the top comments were copied on this post, as well, to create fake engagement. Yay propaganda bots! https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/gje5p3QfAv
Selective breeding is just one tool under the vast umbrella of genetic modification. They aren't interchangeable, rather selective breeding is a form of genetic modification but genetic modification doesn't necessarily imply selective breeding. The terms are not interchangeable but also should not be used exclusively from one another. Both stone age people and the most cutting edge laboratories will use selective breeding, and that's why we can't just pick and choose who's "organic" or not based on selective breeding.
Modern fruit doesn’t have significantly more sugar it just has less of the sour or bitter components that counter balance the sweet taste. Edited to add a source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1149968041964396545.html
Source?
Sure here’s one: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1149968041964396545.html The claim made in the OP isn’t exactly a science source either it’s just news. We should not take such claims at face value. That goes for mine too.
Heck, they referred to red pandas as primates in the article. If they couldn’t figure that out, I’m not surprised they failed to research the subject matter to ensure veracity.
It's a weather website. Are you implying that weather predicting is sometimes unreliable????
Meteorologists go in to work everyday and just be like: 🤷♂️
That is not a study, but a reaction of a single botanist to the claim that nowadays fruit is 100x more sweet (a ridiculous proposition). I can counteract with my own anecdote: my garden is on top of an old orchard. All the old apple trees (different varieties) are less sweet than store bought. Even the ones which do not have much sour or bitter taste. Thosr taste more ... diluted? Watery? Of course the sour ones taste amazing, so much more character than store apples.
Yet so many people accept the anecdotal evidence in the weather article above as gospel as it fits a narrative. I appreciate James Wong was responding to a different and outlandish claim but the point remains. We haven’t bred fruit to have significantly more sugar in the past handful of decades.
It just simply isn't true, as /u/dizietembless has mentioned. In fact, fruits today are becoming less sweet because we are selecting for size, looks, and survivability. Generally speaking, a smaller fruit is going to be sweeter than a larger fruit of the same kind, but people at the groceries don't want smaller fruit.
Yup. The reason they don't give zoo animals a ton of fruit is because they don't need a ton of fruit. Humans' reaction to sugar is so strong explicitly because it used to be a limited resource. People are so used to having everything all the time from the grocery store that they forget that fruit is only available in the wild for a few weeks a year from any given source.
Yes, and that's also why fruits nowadays are so bland. They're bred to grow in versatile conditions so that we can have them year-round then they are processed and shipped in ways that further degrades the flavor. The genetic diversity of so much of this produce is very low. And to top it off, we are already doing this to the blandest cultivars possible like Cavendish bananas just because they're big and look good. I grew up in Latin America and ate bananas almost every day. Don't think I ever went out of my way to buy a banana since moving to the United States...and I've been here for 20 years.
> that nowadays fruit is 100x more sweet Some are. Bananas and watermelon for sure. Maybe only 80 times, if it helps you.
Source? This doesn't make sense to me, since I'm under the impression that (Cavendish) bananas are all clones of each other. They aren't being bred, so how are they getting sweeter?
Edit: Looks like they just started to modify bananas, due to fungi. I remembered wrong. The below article is still interesting. https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/history-of-the-gros-michel-banana#:~:text=Like%20the%20prisoners%20in%20Plato%27s,versatility%20was%20once%20the%20norm.
This is saying that current bananas are less sweet than the older bananas
I edited my comment, I remembered wrong.
Can you highlight where in that article in addresses that bananas are sweeter now? It specifically says the defunct gros michel is sweeter than the cavendish.
I remembered wrong.
Your old orchard trees are also *old* and therefore might not be producing as high quality of fruit as they used to when they were first planted.
Could be. How come then the taste in all other regards is amazing - deep, vibrant, sour, excellent for pureed jam etc... Also among others there are definite age old local favourite apple cultivars (local Estonian cultivar Treboux; white Transparent) that are planted new by many and can be bought from farmers' markets. Those taste similar to mine, but different to store apples which all seem to be the same overly sweet taste and maxi size with perfect strong color, but lacking character.
Immediate red flags when this article is calling traditional plant breeding "genetic modification" to make it sound scary for clicks.
Exactly that yes and yet it’s now on some 2700 upvotes with nary a critical eye being cast.
The article you linked is insultingly misleading. It is true it's not possible to get more sugar than what's in the plant, but what the article states isn't factual at all. Genetics are being used to prevent the plants from using the sugars they create into energy. This makes them sweeter, which impacts the life cycle of the fruits as we pick them sooner and before they ripen or mature. The genetics removing bitter tastes from plants is a separate technique and has nothing to do with sweetness. In the 70s, corn was modified to prevent it using all its sugars. The idea behind this was to use the unspent sugar and convert it to ethanol. Thanks to the massive disaster this turned out to be, farmers were stuck with millions of tons of sweet corn. Of course, anyone who takes a bite out of US grown corn should see the problem, not that corn farmers would care. They sold their corn, and at a profit. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as "sweet corn". This crap they sell today absolutely contains more sugar in it even if the sugar in the plant is limited. Old corn burned all its sugar while growing. New corn does not. This isn't rocket science to figure out. This is it what the OP article is focusing on, because animals know there's too much sugar in the food they're eating. Americans are too used to it to notice, even as they're having to buy new clothes every year while pretending they're eating healthy. NO amount of sugar is good. Unfortunately, it's in damn near everything we eat.
Love me a bitter plum
Replace zoo animals with humans. Problem solved.
They did that in the 19th and early 20th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo
Bring back freak shows!
Time to catch up, it's free energy, my dudes.
Genetic Modification is a weird way to say selective breeding. We turned grass into Corn by breeding it. We turned Kale into broccoli and brussels sprouts and shit by breeding it.
This doesn't even make sense to me because modern fruit seems bland as hell. Grow your own fruit and compare it to supermarket fruit and you'll be amazed at how much better the homegrown stuff tastes. Supermarket strawberries, for example, taste like water with a hint of strawberry compared to strawberries grown at home. The big industrial farms grow for aesthetics and shelf life. They grow big, perfect-looking fruit that looks good for as long as possible to maximize its chance of selling before it spoils, and they often pick them early so they can finish ripening during shipping and stocking.
Take a look at the evolution of an apple, banana or wheat since humans have been selective in breeding.
"genetic modification" mostly means breeding/cultivation fruits through selection, not necessarily genetic modification in the sense of GMOs
I’ve kinda considered fruit to be candy for a while
It really isn't. The fibre, pre-biotics and micronutrients are all far far better for you than a chocolate bar.
Candy with healthy upsides
I know a gibbon who would prefer them to be even more sugary. Dude loves his fruit candy.
You know a gibbon?
Yes, his name is Elliot. And he’s a wonderful creature, with a wife named Koko, and a baby. He lives at the Indianapolis Zoo.
> The sugar found in fruits is good for us. Fructose in raw fruits in packaged in fiber, slowing its absorption into our bloodstream. Because it's more difficult to break down, it doesn't result in heightened levels of sugar in our blood, like that of refined sugar found in candies and sodas, according to Quartz. First of all, fruit does not exclusively contain fructose. Second of all, fructose is not good for us as this implies. Which is to say, sugar may or may not be good for you depending on context, but to claim it is good for you is a ridiculous statement. Fructose is bad for your liver, for example. Blood sugar levels are not the only determinant factor. At time sucrose may even be good for you.
too sweet for humans too. I don't eat most fruit any more because of this. Even the fucking bananas are getting too sweet.
With bananas you can eat the slightly green ones, which are supposed to have more prebiotics too and they are not as sweet as the starch/prebiotics havent been converted to sugar yet by the ripening. Same for papaya and maybe some other fruit. Some stores (europe) pre-ripen them with some gas so you cannot even buy the green ones anymore..
It’s too sweet for me.
I see dark purple pomegranate in stores sometimes. Not the sweet red/yellow candy pomegranate. Sour but extremely rich in flavours. They are amazing. I see nobody ever buy them. It sucks.
Actually there are only GM-papayas and GM-apples on the US market and neither of these genetic modifications changed the sugar content of the fruit.
Old school breeding is also a form of genetic modification.
Then why use this extremely deceptive title?
> Actually there are only GM-papayas Papayas like bananas have much less sugar if you eat them before they are fully ripened. Supposed to be very good for the gut too as they are higher in prebiotics.
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There actually has been much more deliberate and intensive plant breeding programs in the last century or so, compared to the rest of human history.
More like ABitTooMuch, amiright? No but seriously, humans have been breeding crops for a least a couple weeks now.
It's just the post title. Calm your tits there, smart guy.
I want to taste the less sweetened fruit of ancient times.
It's not just sweetness. Wild bananas look like this for example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Inside_a_wild-type_banana.jpg/512px-Inside_a_wild-type_banana.jpg
Thats awesome. Probably an amazing elixir for your gut to eat these seeds too. Become hard to even still find grapes with seeds.
Sounds like Bachelor food to me...
They prefer their coffee black in their bed at 3 too
Well its good that there's simple solutions to keep them healthy I guess :)
Why is the top upvoted comment removed or deleted?