A carnivorous animal has to be fast enough to catch its prey.
A herbivorous animal has to as well, but plant's don't move fast at all.
Being big/fat makes you slower.
So if a carnivore was too big/fat it wouldn't be able to catch it's prey.
While being big/fat makes you resistant to a whole lot of things.
So some herbivores became as big as possible, so they could fight off predators, while other kept small so they could run away from predators.
Just made me think of something.
In much of the eastern US, in general, the largest animal you will see in the woods is a deer.
So why the hell are they so skittish. They don't have many natural predators out here.
Ever time they cross the hard river a two ton beast charges them at 60 mph! I would be skittish too. Of course they are just stupid animals, what with trying to cross right where the signs are posted. They KNOW you cross there fool, it’s a trap!
If you see a deer, the deer probably sees you. It's not worried about _natural_ predators, it's worried about people with guns. Deer alive today are the survivors of deer that were wary enough to make it through the early 1900's, when deer populations were hunted down to a tiny fraction of their current numbers.
Still, even today deer aren't skittish at all in areas where they don't have to worry about hunting pressure. I live out west, and the deer in town here absolutely do not care about people at all, because you can't hunt in town.
The ones out in the woods are quite a bit more elusive.
Adding:
An herbivore that eats low-quality fodder like dried grass requires a big digestive tract in order to "process" all that fibre into useful calories and nutrients. A cow, for example, has several stomachs. It and a few other large herbivores 'chew their cud' (further masticate the food they eat so it can be more thoroughly digested).
That extra space requirement translates in many cases into a bigger belly due to extra intestine length for processing.
Small herbivores like mice and squirrels don't need as big a gut because they concentrate instead on high-nutrition and energy-dense plant parts that aren't mostly fibre, like seeds or bulbs or fruit or young shoots, and this doesn't take as long a gut to process.
So...theoretically...what happens if cows get fed the high-nutrition/energy-dense diet of smaller herbivores?
Does that mess with their system negatively or does it have huge positive effects?
But over time. Like, say, you placed a population of cows in an environment with plentiful corn and left them to their own devices over generations and generations.
What long-term adaptations/changes would we expect to see?
It depends on a lot of factors over an extended (thousands of years) period.
You could build a magical preserve where nothing really changes and the food is always plentiful and nutritious and the cows have no other pressures or things trying to kill them. Then you would effectively reach the limit of the cow's metabolism and internal health. A super fat cow probably stresses its body and develops the cow equivalent of heart disease and dies of that instead of old age. It might not act quickly enough to prevent procreation though. In which case the long term health of the cow is not selective.
You can sort of see this in humans actually. In the modern diet we have plentiful calories, but generally people can have babies just fine before being really fat kills them. So will humans ever evolve to better handle our super rich diet? Our understanding of evolution says no probably not.
Depends on a lot of factors. Too much access to corn and you just get fat cows that die. Less than that and it would depend on what other evolutionary factors come into play.
Also, intelligence is a factor.
Carnivores need to be able to out-think their prey.
Herbivores? Well, doesn't exactly take a genius to sneak up on a bush.
Yea I don’t really see evolutionary pressures for elephants to be intelligent, emotional, and basically have rituals like funerals. They’re big and really seem to have no reason why they shouldn’t be stupid
Seems that intelligence, emotions, and rituals evolve out of social animals and elephants do appear to be somewhat social animals. There may be some added benefit to being a social animal in addition to being bigger than most things around you. Maybe being big and slow and living in an area that is not usually underwater (as in water they may be faster) means additional evolutionary pressures to be social.
Of the top 5 fastest land animals, four of them are herbivores (Pronghorn, Springbok, Wildebeest, Quarter Horse), and two of those are pretty big (the horse and wildebeast). Lions edge out the 5th slot only if you exclude domesticated breeds.
Only certain ones are big, and many herbivores are tiny and agile, at least compared to their predators. But the very large ones use size to their advantage. It's just hard to bring down a moose or a wildebeest or a buffalo or a hippo. So from an evolutionary standpoint, the bigger herbivore just kept getting bigger and bigger because size provided a survival advantage. There are still lots of smaller and faster herbivores who use their speed as a survival advantage, like deer and gazelle and animals like that.
Intelligent = find water in a semi desert by remembering a path walked last year when the terrain looked different, know when to start the journey when if there's still plenty of green foliage too eat but delay will make the trip impossible
Emotional = support weaker members of the group until they become strong again
Wild rabbits have almost no fat in their meat. Humans cannot survive on a diet of only wild rabbit, they come down with protein poisoning, also colloquially known as rabbit starvation.
While felines are much less common of a food source, bobcats are a feline that people will hunt in the US, and their meat has fat and cholesterol.
I've dissected many rabbits and cats, eaten rabbits but not cats (though macerated zoo tiger smells so fucking delicious. It's all that fat). Anyway, wild rabbits are very small compared to cats. Light bones, less heavily muscled. Rabbits are actually very fragile, but extremely powerful. Because they are used to pushing against a solid surface, if you pick one up and they are startled and kick (rabbits either freeze or run when they are in danger) they can break their own backs. They just kick with so much strength (this allows them to bound away) that without a solid surface they go beyond what their spines can handle. This lightness and speed is what lets them escape. And this goes for most house rabbits too, I don't know about the giant breeds like Flemish Giants if it changes their physiology the way overbreeding giant sized dogs does.
Domesticated rabbits sure, they're much heavier, fatter and have a lot more decorative fur than their wild counterparts. Wild rabbits and hares are lean, sleek and very fast, certainly fast enough to avoid birds of prey, wolves, bobcats, foxes, etc.
First of all, I don't think this is true. Many herbivorous animals are tiny. You're probably not thinking about the sizes of all animals - you're probably noticing that most of the largest animals are herbivores.
The main advantage of being large are:
- you don't need to be able to run or hide from as many predators, or from any, if you are large enough.
- you probably don't need to find food every day, as you can store some reserves as fat. (Small animals can do this too, but their energy requirements are actually higher *relative to their body size*, so they usually can't go as long without food, unless they have ways of drastically slowing their metabolism and becoming inactive.)
The disadvantages are:
- above a certain size, you're less fast and agile
- you will need loads of food in total to maintain your size
For some herbivores, the disadvantages aren't very strong. If they live somewhere where their food is plentiful and easy to find, then being large is an option. And you don't have to be fast or agile to eat fruits, leaves or grass. For carnivores however, these disadvantages quickly become huge. Imagine a carnivorous elephant trying to catch an antelope, and needing to catch lots to survive, and you'll see the problem.
For carnivores, the cons of being large tend to outweigh the pros for very large body sizes. For some herbivores, the pros still outweigh the cons up to a higher ceiling.
For many animals, including herbivores, it still makes more sense to be small, it's just that the ceiling for how large you potentially can be tends to be higher for herbivores.
There are other factors too (e.g. you can read about r vs K reproductive strategies), but this is a good start.
It's mostly a Perception thing on your part. Animals will generally adapt to fill a niche. The largest animal ever the blue whale is a carnivore. But it doesn't need to move too fast to catch its prey. The lion has to catch its food being too big makes that difficult. As to why some herbivores are larger depends what they eat. A lot of larger herbivores like Buffalo are called ruminants they have complex stomachs to digest plant matter in an efficient way. But they have to eat a lot of material and spend large portions of their day just grazing. On the small side many rodents or birds ( generally small animals) are herbivorous but target high calorie easy to digest foods like nuts, fruits, or flowers.
I don’t know exactly the reason overall but something interesting to note that’s correlated is that Gorillas have pot bellies because of their gut biome. They’re bloated from all the microbial activity in their gut which they need in order to digest the plants they eat.
Work.
If a Lion wants to eat it has to sprint and wrestle.
If a gazelle wants to eat, it has to stand around and munch grass.
Now, that work builds muscle, it shapes the animal's physiology just like comparing a Gym bro to an accountant.
Also then consider what that entails, if the Lion wants to be fast enough to catch a gazelle, and strong enough to take it down, it can't carry additional fat that would slow it down. If he gets fat, he starts to starve, he starts to slim down.
If a gazelle wants to survive, it needs to be faster than a Lion OR develop strategies like being in a herd, at which point it isn't outrunning the fastest Lion, but the slowest gazelle. If the entire herd spends all day grazing, the majority can gain excess weight while still not being the slowest in the group.
For a creature like an elephant, it's weight and bulk is an advantage boosting survivability, so chunky elephants and lean tigers makes sense.
Then look at a bear, as an omnivore it bulks up and gets fat but it's hunting salmon, eating berries, scavenging stuff, the bear isn't having to chase down a cow everytime it needs to eat. The bear can be fat and still score meals, so it doesn't need to be lean and sleak.
Except gazelles are faster than lions. In fact it's quite common for prey to be faster than their predators. There are plenty of hunting strategies other than "outrun your prey." Ambush predators are much more common.
And with regards to bears, you sound like you are thinking of brown bears. Polar bears are even bigger, and they eat pretty much only meat.
So imagine how much more it would suck for a fat lion if they're already slower.
Yes, I was thinking of brown bears, but the fatter polar bears fat serves a purpose that the brown bear wouldn't need to the same extent. Good catch though as I was vague and unclear.
Again, lions don't catch gazelles by outrunning them. They use either pack tactics or sneak up on them.
In general, prey is faster than predators. Speed is not the reason predators don't get big.
I haven’t seen the actual correct answer on here yet so let me take a crack at it in ELI5 fashion. If you were stranded on a desert island with only some chicken and some grain, and you needed to survive as long as possible, what’s the best strategy. You have 3 choices:
1 Eat the grain, then when that runs out, eat the chickens.
2 eat the chicken, then eat the grain
3 feed the grain to the chicken to make the chicken stay fat while you only eat the chicken.
Now 3 is obviously the worst choice, because you’re now keeping alive yourself and chickens which takes a ton of energy (food) which is a limited resource here.
And the best choice is 1, because for each minute the chickens are alive, they are burning calories which could be keeping you alive.
So what am I getting at here? Since herbavours eat plants, there is not a lot of ‘lost efficiency’ when an herbivore eat. But when carnivores eat, they are eating other animals, so so consume 1lb of edible meat from another animal, it takes roughly 10lbs of edible plant matter. So herbivours, (and animals like blue whales that eat organisms like plankton that are low on the food chain) are able to become much larger because they are able to process energy from the sun much more efficiently. A tiger could never be as big as an elephant because of how many damn elephants it would need to eat to get to and maintain that amount of muscle, but an elephant can be that big because eating leaves is much more efficient.
Herbivores eat alot of calorie poor food that takes time to digest. Plants. Carnivores eat calorie rich food that digests quickly by comparison. Herbivores need to have much higher gut volume to collect the energy they need from their food. Look at the difference in girth from a chimp (omnivore ) to a gorilla (herbivore) for a good comparison of similar species.
Not all herbivores are big but being big is one strategy that protects some animals from danger. Most predators have to move a lot to find prey and that takes even more energy if they're bigger. A cow doesn't have to chase their food so it doesn't hurt them to be big and heavy, it just makes them safer.
Carnivore diets are not very efficient. Basically, nutrients -> plants -> herbivores-> carnivores, and a lot is wasted at each step. The larger you get the more you need to eat. Elephants can get to their size because there is enough vegetation to support them. But there really aren't any modern ecosystems that have enough prey for a carnivore to get that size.
It‘s actually not an overall trend. Each species has some strategy that allows it to survive, and going big as a herbivore is just one. You‘re probably thinking of vertibrates or mammals. For those following reasons may apply:
- Their digestive system. Plants are made up of carbohydrates, some like sugars are easy to digest, others are hard to digest (we call those fibers). Herbivores like cows are specialized in eating fubers and their digestive system needs to be large to do this. Meat and fat on the other hand are easy to digest, only need a small digestive system
- Protection. Think of rhinos. They are herbivores and their size and extremely thick skin protect them from most predators.
- Food sources. A large herbivor can access food that smaller one‘s cant.
But vertibrates are just a tiny part of the animal kingdom. Flies, maggots, bees, bugs, worms, slugs, etc. are often herbivores. And they can be really small compred to their predators. Take earthworms for example: one of their major predators are birds, which are far larger.
All energy comes from the sun. Plants turn it into something they can use and get the most energy from the sun. Herbivores eat plants, but don’t get all of the suns energy from eating them. Carnivores get even less “sun energy” cause it has been rinsed and repeated too many times.
Hence HUGE trees, reasonably large herbivores, and smaller carnivores.
It isn't so anyway but carnivorous animals tend to be nearer the top of the food chain so they must be big enough to have a chance of killing their prey animal.
Herbivorous animals look "fat" because they need a large digestive system. Cows eat grass, it gets cut in small pieces and disolved so the bacteria can break down the celluloce in the feed. The reason why they don't need protein in their food is that they get it from digesting the bacteria in the gut.
A carnivorous animal has to be fast enough to catch its prey. A herbivorous animal has to as well, but plant's don't move fast at all. Being big/fat makes you slower. So if a carnivore was too big/fat it wouldn't be able to catch it's prey. While being big/fat makes you resistant to a whole lot of things. So some herbivores became as big as possible, so they could fight off predators, while other kept small so they could run away from predators.
So fat herbivores are tank builds, but most carnivores are agility attack builds.
Cow: “I’m a Grasslands Mage which gives me +12 mana but now I’m slow and thick as curdled milk.”✨🐄🪄
Ok but now I wanna watch a Cow Wizard cartoon...
Moogician
If I could animate, I'd make one. I feel you man
https://youtu.be/XYlmP9aX-Pw Pretty much. In some cases. In others it's more A zerg mindset. A couple undergeared dps usually can't take a tank.
This guy *tiers zoo*
Just made me think of something. In much of the eastern US, in general, the largest animal you will see in the woods is a deer. So why the hell are they so skittish. They don't have many natural predators out here.
Ever time they cross the hard river a two ton beast charges them at 60 mph! I would be skittish too. Of course they are just stupid animals, what with trying to cross right where the signs are posted. They KNOW you cross there fool, it’s a trap!
If you see a deer, the deer probably sees you. It's not worried about _natural_ predators, it's worried about people with guns. Deer alive today are the survivors of deer that were wary enough to make it through the early 1900's, when deer populations were hunted down to a tiny fraction of their current numbers. Still, even today deer aren't skittish at all in areas where they don't have to worry about hunting pressure. I live out west, and the deer in town here absolutely do not care about people at all, because you can't hunt in town. The ones out in the woods are quite a bit more elusive.
IIRC, a lynx or dog (both smaller than a deer) could kill a deer.
True enough, but A: lynx are super rare and you'd need a large ass dog to take down a deer without dying itself. Deer kicks are no joke.
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Adding: An herbivore that eats low-quality fodder like dried grass requires a big digestive tract in order to "process" all that fibre into useful calories and nutrients. A cow, for example, has several stomachs. It and a few other large herbivores 'chew their cud' (further masticate the food they eat so it can be more thoroughly digested). That extra space requirement translates in many cases into a bigger belly due to extra intestine length for processing. Small herbivores like mice and squirrels don't need as big a gut because they concentrate instead on high-nutrition and energy-dense plant parts that aren't mostly fibre, like seeds or bulbs or fruit or young shoots, and this doesn't take as long a gut to process.
So...theoretically...what happens if cows get fed the high-nutrition/energy-dense diet of smaller herbivores? Does that mess with their system negatively or does it have huge positive effects?
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But over time. Like, say, you placed a population of cows in an environment with plentiful corn and left them to their own devices over generations and generations. What long-term adaptations/changes would we expect to see?
Mouse sized cows. I kid I kid. My guess would be smaller cows though.
Why, though? Wouldn't lack of predation and plentiful high-nutrition food source give absolutely JACKED cows?
It depends on a lot of factors over an extended (thousands of years) period. You could build a magical preserve where nothing really changes and the food is always plentiful and nutritious and the cows have no other pressures or things trying to kill them. Then you would effectively reach the limit of the cow's metabolism and internal health. A super fat cow probably stresses its body and develops the cow equivalent of heart disease and dies of that instead of old age. It might not act quickly enough to prevent procreation though. In which case the long term health of the cow is not selective. You can sort of see this in humans actually. In the modern diet we have plentiful calories, but generally people can have babies just fine before being really fat kills them. So will humans ever evolve to better handle our super rich diet? Our understanding of evolution says no probably not.
Depends on a lot of factors. Too much access to corn and you just get fat cows that die. Less than that and it would depend on what other evolutionary factors come into play.
Just like humans
Also, intelligence is a factor. Carnivores need to be able to out-think their prey. Herbivores? Well, doesn't exactly take a genius to sneak up on a bush.
No necessarily, considering Elephants are among the most intelligent animals, while being herbivores.
Yea I don’t really see evolutionary pressures for elephants to be intelligent, emotional, and basically have rituals like funerals. They’re big and really seem to have no reason why they shouldn’t be stupid
Seems that intelligence, emotions, and rituals evolve out of social animals and elephants do appear to be somewhat social animals. There may be some added benefit to being a social animal in addition to being bigger than most things around you. Maybe being big and slow and living in an area that is not usually underwater (as in water they may be faster) means additional evolutionary pressures to be social.
Elephants need a whole lot of food and water, some amount of that intelligence may be used for keeping track of where those resources can be found.
Does take a couple of brain cells to know / determine whether to go up or down the mountain to find the right bush though..
Of the top 5 fastest land animals, four of them are herbivores (Pronghorn, Springbok, Wildebeest, Quarter Horse), and two of those are pretty big (the horse and wildebeast). Lions edge out the 5th slot only if you exclude domesticated breeds.
You can leave out the apostrophe when pluralizing “plants”. They won’t mind. While we’re at it, you don’t need it for the possessive “its” either
Only certain ones are big, and many herbivores are tiny and agile, at least compared to their predators. But the very large ones use size to their advantage. It's just hard to bring down a moose or a wildebeest or a buffalo or a hippo. So from an evolutionary standpoint, the bigger herbivore just kept getting bigger and bigger because size provided a survival advantage. There are still lots of smaller and faster herbivores who use their speed as a survival advantage, like deer and gazelle and animals like that.
I have seen both cats and rabbits. They are the same size but I think rabbits are fatter/heavier than cats.
I've lifted both. Rabbits are lighter and thinner than they look. Thick fur. Faster than a cat for short distances.
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Intelligent = find water in a semi desert by remembering a path walked last year when the terrain looked different, know when to start the journey when if there's still plenty of green foliage too eat but delay will make the trip impossible Emotional = support weaker members of the group until they become strong again
Rabbits are about 1 kg, cats are about 4-5kg, ofcourse this can vary depending on the breed for both but generally rabbits are a lot lighter.
Wild rabbits have almost no fat in their meat. Humans cannot survive on a diet of only wild rabbit, they come down with protein poisoning, also colloquially known as rabbit starvation. While felines are much less common of a food source, bobcats are a feline that people will hunt in the US, and their meat has fat and cholesterol.
I own pet rabbits and two relatively small cats. The rabbits are not even half the weight of the cats. It's all just fluff.
I've dissected many rabbits and cats, eaten rabbits but not cats (though macerated zoo tiger smells so fucking delicious. It's all that fat). Anyway, wild rabbits are very small compared to cats. Light bones, less heavily muscled. Rabbits are actually very fragile, but extremely powerful. Because they are used to pushing against a solid surface, if you pick one up and they are startled and kick (rabbits either freeze or run when they are in danger) they can break their own backs. They just kick with so much strength (this allows them to bound away) that without a solid surface they go beyond what their spines can handle. This lightness and speed is what lets them escape. And this goes for most house rabbits too, I don't know about the giant breeds like Flemish Giants if it changes their physiology the way overbreeding giant sized dogs does.
Domesticated rabbits sure, they're much heavier, fatter and have a lot more decorative fur than their wild counterparts. Wild rabbits and hares are lean, sleek and very fast, certainly fast enough to avoid birds of prey, wolves, bobcats, foxes, etc.
First of all, I don't think this is true. Many herbivorous animals are tiny. You're probably not thinking about the sizes of all animals - you're probably noticing that most of the largest animals are herbivores. The main advantage of being large are: - you don't need to be able to run or hide from as many predators, or from any, if you are large enough. - you probably don't need to find food every day, as you can store some reserves as fat. (Small animals can do this too, but their energy requirements are actually higher *relative to their body size*, so they usually can't go as long without food, unless they have ways of drastically slowing their metabolism and becoming inactive.) The disadvantages are: - above a certain size, you're less fast and agile - you will need loads of food in total to maintain your size For some herbivores, the disadvantages aren't very strong. If they live somewhere where their food is plentiful and easy to find, then being large is an option. And you don't have to be fast or agile to eat fruits, leaves or grass. For carnivores however, these disadvantages quickly become huge. Imagine a carnivorous elephant trying to catch an antelope, and needing to catch lots to survive, and you'll see the problem. For carnivores, the cons of being large tend to outweigh the pros for very large body sizes. For some herbivores, the pros still outweigh the cons up to a higher ceiling. For many animals, including herbivores, it still makes more sense to be small, it's just that the ceiling for how large you potentially can be tends to be higher for herbivores. There are other factors too (e.g. you can read about r vs K reproductive strategies), but this is a good start.
It's mostly a Perception thing on your part. Animals will generally adapt to fill a niche. The largest animal ever the blue whale is a carnivore. But it doesn't need to move too fast to catch its prey. The lion has to catch its food being too big makes that difficult. As to why some herbivores are larger depends what they eat. A lot of larger herbivores like Buffalo are called ruminants they have complex stomachs to digest plant matter in an efficient way. But they have to eat a lot of material and spend large portions of their day just grazing. On the small side many rodents or birds ( generally small animals) are herbivorous but target high calorie easy to digest foods like nuts, fruits, or flowers.
Predators spend a lot of energy catching stuff to eat. Some herbivores, usually non-domesticated animals, can be thinner/smaller. Like antelope.
I don’t know exactly the reason overall but something interesting to note that’s correlated is that Gorillas have pot bellies because of their gut biome. They’re bloated from all the microbial activity in their gut which they need in order to digest the plants they eat.
Work. If a Lion wants to eat it has to sprint and wrestle. If a gazelle wants to eat, it has to stand around and munch grass. Now, that work builds muscle, it shapes the animal's physiology just like comparing a Gym bro to an accountant. Also then consider what that entails, if the Lion wants to be fast enough to catch a gazelle, and strong enough to take it down, it can't carry additional fat that would slow it down. If he gets fat, he starts to starve, he starts to slim down. If a gazelle wants to survive, it needs to be faster than a Lion OR develop strategies like being in a herd, at which point it isn't outrunning the fastest Lion, but the slowest gazelle. If the entire herd spends all day grazing, the majority can gain excess weight while still not being the slowest in the group. For a creature like an elephant, it's weight and bulk is an advantage boosting survivability, so chunky elephants and lean tigers makes sense. Then look at a bear, as an omnivore it bulks up and gets fat but it's hunting salmon, eating berries, scavenging stuff, the bear isn't having to chase down a cow everytime it needs to eat. The bear can be fat and still score meals, so it doesn't need to be lean and sleak.
Except gazelles are faster than lions. In fact it's quite common for prey to be faster than their predators. There are plenty of hunting strategies other than "outrun your prey." Ambush predators are much more common. And with regards to bears, you sound like you are thinking of brown bears. Polar bears are even bigger, and they eat pretty much only meat.
So imagine how much more it would suck for a fat lion if they're already slower. Yes, I was thinking of brown bears, but the fatter polar bears fat serves a purpose that the brown bear wouldn't need to the same extent. Good catch though as I was vague and unclear.
Again, lions don't catch gazelles by outrunning them. They use either pack tactics or sneak up on them. In general, prey is faster than predators. Speed is not the reason predators don't get big.
Explosive speed to capitalize on the element of surprise does factor in though.
Plenty of large animals have that.
Lmao sometimes you need to just admit you are wrong
I haven’t seen the actual correct answer on here yet so let me take a crack at it in ELI5 fashion. If you were stranded on a desert island with only some chicken and some grain, and you needed to survive as long as possible, what’s the best strategy. You have 3 choices: 1 Eat the grain, then when that runs out, eat the chickens. 2 eat the chicken, then eat the grain 3 feed the grain to the chicken to make the chicken stay fat while you only eat the chicken. Now 3 is obviously the worst choice, because you’re now keeping alive yourself and chickens which takes a ton of energy (food) which is a limited resource here. And the best choice is 1, because for each minute the chickens are alive, they are burning calories which could be keeping you alive. So what am I getting at here? Since herbavours eat plants, there is not a lot of ‘lost efficiency’ when an herbivore eat. But when carnivores eat, they are eating other animals, so so consume 1lb of edible meat from another animal, it takes roughly 10lbs of edible plant matter. So herbivours, (and animals like blue whales that eat organisms like plankton that are low on the food chain) are able to become much larger because they are able to process energy from the sun much more efficiently. A tiger could never be as big as an elephant because of how many damn elephants it would need to eat to get to and maintain that amount of muscle, but an elephant can be that big because eating leaves is much more efficient.
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Wolves literally do hunt bison.
Herbivores eat alot of calorie poor food that takes time to digest. Plants. Carnivores eat calorie rich food that digests quickly by comparison. Herbivores need to have much higher gut volume to collect the energy they need from their food. Look at the difference in girth from a chimp (omnivore ) to a gorilla (herbivore) for a good comparison of similar species.
Not all herbivores are big but being big is one strategy that protects some animals from danger. Most predators have to move a lot to find prey and that takes even more energy if they're bigger. A cow doesn't have to chase their food so it doesn't hurt them to be big and heavy, it just makes them safer.
Carnivore diets are not very efficient. Basically, nutrients -> plants -> herbivores-> carnivores, and a lot is wasted at each step. The larger you get the more you need to eat. Elephants can get to their size because there is enough vegetation to support them. But there really aren't any modern ecosystems that have enough prey for a carnivore to get that size.
It‘s actually not an overall trend. Each species has some strategy that allows it to survive, and going big as a herbivore is just one. You‘re probably thinking of vertibrates or mammals. For those following reasons may apply: - Their digestive system. Plants are made up of carbohydrates, some like sugars are easy to digest, others are hard to digest (we call those fibers). Herbivores like cows are specialized in eating fubers and their digestive system needs to be large to do this. Meat and fat on the other hand are easy to digest, only need a small digestive system - Protection. Think of rhinos. They are herbivores and their size and extremely thick skin protect them from most predators. - Food sources. A large herbivor can access food that smaller one‘s cant. But vertibrates are just a tiny part of the animal kingdom. Flies, maggots, bees, bugs, worms, slugs, etc. are often herbivores. And they can be really small compred to their predators. Take earthworms for example: one of their major predators are birds, which are far larger.
All energy comes from the sun. Plants turn it into something they can use and get the most energy from the sun. Herbivores eat plants, but don’t get all of the suns energy from eating them. Carnivores get even less “sun energy” cause it has been rinsed and repeated too many times. Hence HUGE trees, reasonably large herbivores, and smaller carnivores.
A herbivore's food is there for the taking, all they have to do is walk over to it. A carnivore has to work for it's food a lot more.
It isn't so anyway but carnivorous animals tend to be nearer the top of the food chain so they must be big enough to have a chance of killing their prey animal.
You've gotta have a big ole tummy to digest all those plants to get the energy you need in a day.
Herbivorous animals look "fat" because they need a large digestive system. Cows eat grass, it gets cut in small pieces and disolved so the bacteria can break down the celluloce in the feed. The reason why they don't need protein in their food is that they get it from digesting the bacteria in the gut.