Hey, look a feature every mammal may need to evolve in the near future!
Are oceans getting saltier? The glaciers that are melting are pure freshwater
EDIT
I’m not an expert but from a quick googling it seems the oceans are getting LESS salty
https://www.llnl.gov/article/37921/atmospheric-warming-altering-ocean-salinity-and-water-cycle
The issue is not more/less salt in the oceans, but fewer and less reliable sources of freshwater.
Which makes it the perfect time to evolve!
Oceans getting less salt
Rivers and lakes in Canada getting more salt
But I think they were referring to running out of reliable fresh water due to drought
I suppose that’s only a short-term effect.
Long-term prognosis should be the oceans getting saltier because of the rivers carrying salt into the oceans until the equilibrium between salt being carried into the oceans and salt being sedimented at the ocean bed has been restored.
Well, in geological time frames ‘short-term’ can be quite a long timespan.You’re halfway there! If the oceans are getting less salty, where else’s the extra water coming from?
I literally already said the answer to that in my original comment.
I think that what SpaceNoodle is trying to say is that the decrease in ocean salinity is correlated to a decrease in fresh water, so even though salinity is dropping, adaptations need to be made because we will run out of fresh water.
I literally already said the answer to that in my original comment.
Uhh, no you didn’t? At least, not the way I interpret it.
It looks like you were saying “oceans are getting less salty, and therefore this adaptation is less needed”. But @[email protected] was saying “the reason they’re getting less salty is because fresh water is becoming more scarce, and therefore the adaptations are more needed”.
But why male models?
Sorry, I meant where else.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop fucking cats.
When was the right week?
Same week they started or ideally the one before that? 🤷
We need you back in the fight soldier, we need to make cat girls (and boys) a reality.
Furrda!
I’ve been fucking the dog for decades.
That’s a really old dog
Nah. He died when he was like six.
thats a really interesting username, got a story?
The fact that you need to tell people not to intentionally give their cat salt water is telling of how far we’ve regressed as a society.
Humans are naturally curious and lean towards the scientific method, that’s why we always need a disclaimer, don’t TRY this, they still will.
“Scientific method”?
Most people’s “method” is YOLO/HMB for lols. Thank goodness cats have nine lives.
HMB? How many bombs?
‘Hold my beer’ I believe
trump entered the chat
Yeah or when something has been proven by the scientific method and they want to feel special so they specifically do the opposite of the beneficial thing
Well, you know what they say about curiosity and cats…
curiosity
“Better to send a robot to Mars, than a cat” my papi used to say
please don’t go out of your way to give salt water to your cat
Advice to live by.
Still, that’s pretty impressive. Cats are absolutely incredible animals. I’m thankful the “worst behaved cats” still love me for whatever reason because I’ve been able to see some of the crazy shit they do.
My parents have an entirely blind 18 year old cat. She can navigate the entire house eats fine, plays a bit. Hops up and down furniture, finds the sunbathing spots, uses the litter just fine. You do have to keep an eye out for her if your moving around as she can’t smell fast enough if you step in front of her path.
I’m trying to imagine the world from this cat’s point of view. Relying on smells, sounds, touch and vibration. I bet she can hear and smell small critters just fine, but would she be able to successfully hunt them?
She can still hunt rabbits somehow.
Not that they let her. They just discovered this by accident. She’s an indoor cat that roams their high fence backyard when they’re out there.
If the critter is close enough, their whiskers can pick up on vibrations in the air AFAIK, so they could probably still hunt.
Don’t tell me what to do! /s
They say the same thing about horses because of their kidney to body size ratio but it’s simply not true. It might help them survive on saltwater longer than a human would but it’s still a death march.
I could see that since horses require a salt lick anyway.
I feel like that just because of their body size and the fact that they sweat.
Can we use it somehow?
Seems oretty obvious. You can let the cat drink the salt water. Then kill the cat and drink the filtered water from it’s kidneys.
Just drink cat piss
Gave it up years ago.
Can the kidneys then be used to string tennis rackets?
You’re an adorable little urchin, Max.
Gratuitous acts of senseless violence are my forte!
Man this exchange took me back
One of the greatest point and click games ever released.
we’re going to need to evolve this superpower if we want to avoid my grandkids and your grandkids killing each other in the global water wars.
we could also just build desalination plants with a field of solar panels next to them, but what do i know
Evolutionary household cats are damn near perfection.
Not a crab
Part tortoise on account of the tortoiseshell, which is an adjacent water animal
Not a great white either. Basically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years and absolute apex in every way.
No longer apex. I can kill a Great White… With plastic rubbish!
Minus in getting hunted by orcas way 😌 https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/lone-orca-kills-great-white-shark-video/
Purrfection
More evidence that they are evil creatures
You mean superior.
Found the cat.
Yes, this one, it lacks the toxo. Do it quickly.
*muffled gun noises*
I’m my experience folks who call Cats “evil” usually don’t have a very clear understanding of consent or non-verbal communication.
Cats taught me boundaries and karma as a kid. Lessons all should learn.
I like cats, but this argument is dumb. The people I know who don’t like cats don’t like them precisely because cats don’t respect boundaries or consent the way dogs do.
People I know who don’t like Cats don’t like them because they expect them to allow them to cross all their boundaries like dogs do. You can’t expect a basically wild predator to respect your boundaries, you can however respect its boundaries and that is where the folks I’ve met who dislike Cats fail. They try to hold it and get scratched because it didn’t like it. They overstimulate it and get scratched because the cat didn’t like it. I’ve seen SO many people who dislike Cats because they don’t understand how to approach an animal with caution and respect, and think that because the wild predator responded to discomfort the way a wild predator would do, that Cats are bad or evil.
Edit, to clarify, my comment was about people who say Cats are evil, not about people who simply don’t like them.
Yes, you can’t expect an animal that basically tamed itself to respect your boundaries, and that’s why dog people don’t like them. They jump on the counter or try to break your coffee cup if it’s too close to the edge of the table.
But overwhelmingly, in my experience as a cat shelter volunteer, people who have owned catsand do not like them feel that way, not because Mittens got overstimulated and scratched them once, but because they cannot cope with their boundaries being disrespected all the time. It isn’t the cats fault, true. It’s just an animal acting the way it evolved to act–but let’s try to be understanding about why many people struggle with them as pets.
It really does take a certain personality to be okay with living with a cat.
Wow, you’re completely right and I never recognized this before. I’m your quintessential cat person. I’ve lived with cats since the day I was born. They cuddled with me in my crib. My first word was cat. We joked that I was raised by cats. I’m just used to cats and don’t often think about their behavior.
My partner is a dog person, so now we have a mixed family. When the dogs cross a boundary, we do something to correct their behavior and there is the expectation their behavior will change. If it doesn’t, we adjust our response until it does. When cats cross a boundary, we still do something to correct the behavior, but entirely expect the cat will continue doing it and respond no differently when they continue with the original behavior.
I grew up in a mixed pet family. My dad loves cats; my mom dogs. It was exactly the way you describe it, too. I get why people adore cats and dogs both, but they do draw different personalities.
I feel the same about dogs honestly. I prefer older small dogs because I find that when they do cross my boundaries I’m less likely to be injured in anyway. I honestly dont know how I would be able to live with large dog. Its funny that you say that cats cross boundaries a lot, because my experience has definitely been the opposite 😅 a dog is the size of a person too. When those cross my boundaries I usually get physically hurt. I suppose the experience of other people must be different lol
Congrats! You got my biggest eyeroll of the day
Ah yes, because if there’s one thing evil creatures are famously resistant to, it’s salt.
Penguins too but its in a supraorbital gland in their beak
Gulls too
They can drink salt water when times are tough but it still wouldn’t be good to drink it for a sustained amount of time.
I’m sorry, have you looked around recently?
Last time cats drank this much salt water was the Hoover administration!
Those were the days!
Especially when kidneys are often the first part that craps out when they get old
Sort or related question, is that why their piss reeks like concentrated jenkem?
That’d be ammonia, a metabolic byproduct of their carnivorous diet.
Not trying to be that guy, but it’s urea, which breaks down to ammonia due to microbial action once it’s out of the cat. If a cat is pissing ammonia, it has big problems and needs to see a vet.
Other contributors to awful cat piss smell are mercaptans, the same compounds responsible for the scent of skunk spray, and pheromones and fatty acids released when the cat is spraying versus normal urination. It’s all compounded by cats being adapted for arid environments so their urine is much more concentrated than human urine.
I love cats but they’re gross little fuckers sometimes.
this is why it’s ideal to befriend a neighbourhood cat, all the positives without the negatives
Isn’t all Jenkem concentrated?
I’m under the impression that the basic product itself isn’t a concentration, but more of a fermented brew.
Wait is Jenkem the… Substance or is Jenkem the fumes that come off of the… Substance 🤢
The substance itself, in the same way that the smoke coming off a cigarette isn’t tobacco.
Dehydration is a common cause for cats to be ‘ill’ and brought to the vet,* so it could be that their piss reeks because they are having to concentrate it so much in the first place.
*source: a dimly remembered conversation with a vet friend when I asked her why she was adding water to the already wet food for her cat. She said her cat could never be encouraged to drink enough, so it was her way of staving off the annoyance of giving iv fluids to her own animal someday.
That makes sense, I wonder if it’s the case and how common it is. I’ll have to ask a vet tech that I know.
It’s absolutely a thing, I’ve had several cats in my life look nearly on the brink of death before basically forcing them to drink or eat turned them around completely. They can be very stubborn. Fountains help a lot because in nature moving water is typically cleaner than standing water, so if your cat always refuses to drink, get a $10 cat fountain on Amazon, it works!
also stop giving them dry-ass pellets with a bunch of grains in them, nut up and live with the smell of wet food and buy some chicken innards for them every now and then.
Don’t cats often die from kidney disease? :(
yep, usually the first organ to fail in old cats, so the superpower seems to come with a drawback. edit: removed inaccurate statements
That’s why they don’t like taking baths
Yes, but often as a result of a long diet with chronic dehydration from a kibble based diet.
The moisture cats consume is from their prey. The blood and juices of rodents and birds hydrate cats.
Canned/wet food cats tend to wind up with thyroid issues instead of kidney. (Well, sorta: there’s evidence the BPAs in cans and mercury from fish as a reason for that.)
Well this is partially true. I’m pretty sure even a cat on a perfect diet will still have very high chances of developing chronic kidney disease in old age because it is just common in cats.
Could be wrong but my understanding is that It’s partially because their kidneys are so efficient that they often get kidney disease in late age. They’re always under a super high workload.
Old age, in and of itself, doesn’t kill any living thing. There’s always a system failure eventually. Seems like in cats that’s commonly kidneys or thyroid.
I could say that is an impressive evolutionary feat, but instead I’ll say: Evolution, what the hell is wrong with you? You do know we all came from the sea, you should know 70% of the earth is covered in salt water, why did you think it was ok to devolve the ability to drink salt water but retain the requirement to drink water? Are you Ok? Do you need Jesus?
kidney disease is one of the most common ways cats die of old age so super efficient kidneys dont come without a tradeoff. Cats have evolved to live in very arid enviorments where saltwater is all that is availible so the tradeoff might have been worth it. ability to drink saltwater only would work without kidneys being prematurely overstressed would be likely if animals had higher normal salt content but that would mean they would need a lot higher salt intake making living inland harder.
IDK man, whales can live over 200 years.
but whales like all sea creatures have high bodry salt content making the osmotic pressure difference small
Ok, so here’s an Idea, have more salt in our fluids.
Great idea except we’d need another million years of evolution or more
No, you’re missing the point again, when fish first went land diving they drank salt water because of that there body would have already had more salt and so would there kidneys, we evolved the ability to drink fresh water, that is what took a million years.
I didn’t comment elsewhere but from this incoherent comment it’s clear you don’t have the first clue what you’re on about, or why I said a million years (evolving a major change like sea to land takes hundreds of millions or billions of years).
Ideas are good, but people contributing ideas that show they don’t know anything at all about the topic, while insisting they’re right, gets tiresome.
irradiated reproductive cells go brrr
if humans would be adapted to that it could work but it would mean without modern technology it would be close to impossible to survive without access to saltwater (most of human habitable land area)
Well we were already adapted for it or at least our ancient ancient fish ancestors were we lost the ability that’s my core point, salt isn’t exactly rare and other minerals can be used to reduce osmotic pressure, but besides that 40% of all people live near salt water and ~30% of all land animals live near salt water so I wouldn’t think that would be enough to lose such a valuable resource as water, I am obviously wrong since we can’t drink salt water but it still feels like a miss step.
i guess in the case of humans we would have evolved for a long time to mainly eat fruit that has a high water content with low salt content possibly even being most of needed water intake. after starting to eat meat perhaps there hasnt been enough evolutionary pressure to be able to regain saltwater consumption ability
Evolution is very short-sighted, and not at all good at planning.
Evolution is considered a success if the animal lives long enough to successfully mate and nothing else matters to mindless evolution. At least cats don’t have curly tusks that borrow through the skull if they live long enough like that infamous boar species I can’t remember the name of.
Success is being better about producing offspring that can grow old enough to produce offspring better* than everything competing for your niech
*Better is the more optimal rate. Overpopulation is sub optimal
Airid environment animals that could subsist on metabolic water and blood to an extent. In inland arid environments most standing water never makes it to an ocean, which means it accumulates surface salts and is brackish.
Amazing animal.
