How nice of science to demand the motivation of the mother for ditching her kid.
Is this post text written by AI? It seems very, "no, but yes, but maybe". It's like it's written by an LLM trained on clickbait.
The last few memes have been bullshit about the kind of day I've been having to spend around my mother in law and thank you y'all for helping
If the mother gets eaten, the offspring in her pouch will be too. Sacrificing one to save the others and maintain the opportunity to reproduce again in the future works out from an evolutionary standpoint.
Remember, you only get to live once. You can also have more children.
More where that came from lol!
-Momma Quokka
Maybe their flight response causes them to lose control of their pouch muscles (because that’s not a priority to survive), therefore accidentally dropping their babies.
While this may have happened accidentally at times, there is no way the potential for an accident like that would not be either selected and incorporated, or selected against and rejected as a survival trait.
Not necessarily. Evolution doesn't optimize trait by trait.
If the flight response leads to overall more reproduction it would naturally pass on regardless of any effect of the loss of pouch control.
The dropping of the baby wouldn't necessarily be a trait itself, but a side effect of the flight response.
If the drop response was paired against retaining the offspring, and if the drop response coded genetically, more survivors would result potentially for several reasons: predator would be distracted by the discarded offspring and less likely, but the reduced weight burden.
The effect that would be "canonized" or fixed would be the relaxation of the pouch. If dropping kids had a negative reproductive effect, the pouch would stop going slack eventually. If it had a positive effect, the pouch would relax more readily, so it wasn't an occasional accident but a common strategy.
My point is that something that has such a direct effect on reproduction is never going to get "ignored" by selection.
If the relaxation of the pouch is directly tied to the stress/adrenaline response diverting resources elsewhere, which aids in escape, then it's not so easy to optimize to not loose the pouch. Pouch relaxation wouldn't be the genetic trait being selected for or against, flight response would be.
It can be more harmful for the pouch to be relaxed than not on an isolated level, but if that's counteracted by the increased ability to escape due to resource allocation then it would pass on as a "by product" regardless of its individual effect.
There may not be an existing genetic variation which maintains the pouch control during the flight response without compromise on the degree of speed or intensity dedicated to the escape. Evolution can't select for mutations that don't yet exist in the gene pool.
Do you know this from reading it somewhere or are you just making shit up because it makes you feel better?
Just theorizing based on the information in the body of the post. You ok dude? Must be exhausting to be mad all the time.
So, making shit up.
God forbid someone can make guesses and think of possibilities in a meme community.
English mother quokka, do you speak it!?
correction on that last sentence. mother's want to save themselves because they don't want to die. they are not making any calculations about their own fertility.
this strategy doesn't prove to be a major evolutionary disadvantage because the mothers are proven to be fertile so there is no evolutionary pressure to remove this trait but that's an analysis a human scientist is making. not the quokka
The individual Quokka isn't making that analysis, but evolutionary selection is
Evolution doesn't work that way. It's not picking and choosing traits. It's not making analysis.
The quokka just survives to pass on that trait so it persists.
yes 👍
Semantics, but I would say evolution is indeed picking and choosing traits, in the sense that an algorithm picks a result. It's not some conscious being though.
semantics are important when talking about evolutionary science. especially when a large segment of the population dismisses evolution as a "theory" with little understanding of what the term "theory" means in the context of science.
Gravity is also just a "theory", that's why I float off into space some days.
but that's an analysis a human scientist is making. not the quokka
This is an important distinction to make in general regarding science communication about evolution. Far too often, the evolutionary process is anthropomorphized, adding confusion to the scientifically illiterate. I watched a documentary once where some biologists were in the Amazon, noticed a brightly colored fish, and opined to the camera "why would evolution do this?" That is a terrible way to communicate a scientific curiosity.
It's not that they throw them, they "accidentally" fall from the pouch
Cute
Relatable.
Yeet the baby!
Well, this makes that smile diabolical.. lol
What natural predators do quokkas even have??
