Talk:Striped polecat

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"Due to their small stomachs, they must eat often" this has to have causality backwards, doesn't it? Because they eat often, they don't need large stomachs. If eating often due to their small stomachs were a problem, they would have evolved larger stomachs Demigord (talk) 20:11, 17 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not exactly. Because of opportunity cost, the causality of an evolutionary adaptation runs both ways. While it could be that they happened to eat small amounts, often, because of pressures unrelated to their stomachs, and so natural selection favored small stomachs in favor of wasting energy on unnecessarily large ones, or it could be that there was selective pressure against having a large stomach, either merely because it was an unnecessary waste of energy and weight to carry the little bit of extra, or something more unique to the stomach, such as the increased risk of a particular bacteria posing a larger risk to the stomach, a predisposition to stomach cancer that is correlated with the number of cells in the stomach, etc., and then, as a result of the fact that they evolved to have those small stomachs, they would be forced to eat frequently as a trade-off. Whichever it is, I'm sure there are aspects of both. 2600:8801:1C00:DDD0:25D3:B15:1F45:EC1E (talk) 11:19, 18 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]