this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
479 points (96.3% liked)

Science Memes

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chadodiles (mander.xyz)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] Sheeple 62 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Unable to open mouth when it's held shut by even minimal exterior force

[–] tdawg 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Wait, really?

[–] Triyfer 51 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yes. Their jaw muscles are designed to hold prey, so their bite down is incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, most of their muscle mass is dedicated to that single action, not the other way. That's why you can hold their mouths shut with rubber bands or your bare hands, if need be.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

Sounds like very poorly designed fitness plan? Maybe stop skipping jaw antagonist muscles day?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I may need to append that its due to the level one grabs the chadolines mouth. You have been warned.

[–] moistclump 6 points 10 months ago

Apparently an elastic band could hold it shut. If I recall correctly. Now saying out loud I’m not sure that I did.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I'm sure not gonna be the one to get close enough to hold its mouth shut. No siree.

[–] Kyrgizion 38 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

They just reached top possible performance for their specific niche. They're basically perfect, so there is little need for evolution to change anything - random selection keeps selecting the same traits for millions of years because those are the ones that work and manage to get them to reproduce.

I like to think of it as having maxed out one specific talent tree for that environment.

[–] Aloha_Alaska 18 points 10 months ago

Exactly! They didn’t explore the “aerial flight” or “beautiful colors” tech tree at all, but are maxed on armor and chomping.

[–] kadu 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That's not actually necessarily true. Even if we adopt this "top possible performance" thing, which isn't how organisms work, you can't guarantee their current set of traits would be this optimal maximum.

Evolution can only work with traits already present, or small additions or deletions. It can't jump around. Meaning, for instance, perhaps a crocodile capable of shooting a literal stream of acid would be even more optimized for this environment - but such a trait can't appear out of thin air, and the necessary stepping stones won't be selected.

[–] EpicGamer 4 points 10 months ago

They might also be more succesfull if they can put sticks and stones together to eventually create a military industrial complex in order to hunt prey using a 50 Caliber machine gun.

[–] repungnant_canary 3 points 10 months ago

Sounds like machine learning with a very small learning rate. You will most likely end up in a local minimum ie. no acid shooting (it would be cool and terrifying)

[–] MuhammadJesusGaySex 26 points 10 months ago

Another fun fact about crocodiles, and alligators is that they actually have the immune systems that conservatives think they have.

But for real, they are trying to make new antibiotics from crocodile and alligator blood.

[–] moistclump 23 points 10 months ago

They’re kinda scared of hippos, so much so that hippo baby’s use them for teething and they just kinda take it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

Living every rich man's dream - lie in a pool all day and go safari hunting without a licence. What more could one possibly need??

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

When you reach max level, you stop leveling.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Boring animal: Chomp!

Chadodile: Chomp Spinny-Spinny!