this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Besides humans, aren't most apes prey animals?
What do you mean by prey animals? Animals that prey on others or are you calling them prey themselves? And just because an animal is a predator doesn't mean there aren't larger predators that will kill and eat them. Ultimately most apes are omnivores who eat fruit and berries, along with leaves and other shit, but will eat meat and have been known to prey on animals, yet it's not their main source of food. They're not apex predators but they aren't actively prey.
The same holds true for a lot of animals. There aren't many purely "vegan" animals. A horse will snack a mouse too if it gets the opportunity.
Plus evolutionary history shows plenty of examples of animals switching from pure carnivore to pure herbivore to omnivores in between, and back the other direction. All birds are descended from a common carnivorous ancestor, but plenty of birds today subsist mostly on seeds or fruit.
If there is a lot of available biomass to be eaten, nature will find a way and some animal is going to fill that niche. Many of the folivores (herbivores specializing in digesting leaves) that descended from carnivores have to deal with the low nutrient/calorie density of their foods by just eating a lot of it, and have varying levels of microbial symbiosis for helping with that digestion.
I am using the same definitions as the meme
Ah, I guess you are but you put it in a different place in your sentence compared to the comic, which confused me at first as it can be interpreted both ways with how you wrote it. Either way, the rest of my comment should still be relevant.
...too bad for the internet, eh?..
I don't think anything is preying upon gorillas, the biggest predators for chimps are chimps and humans, though young ones are taken by birds too
Humans in the wild are prey to crocodile, big cats, bears, wolves and young ones from an even longer list
Humans and chimpanzees are definitely predators. Humans who lived through the recent ice age outside the tropics were pure carnivores as no edible plants grow on glaciers; all the big animals and most of the dangerous ones went extinct just after humans got to an area
Bonobos eat fruit. Not much eats them
The apes are all pretty good at defending themselves and are their own worst enemy