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Cannibalistic Arctic Ursines

There are some very good reasons that humans and most other mammals eschew cannibalism.

The one exception that comes to mind, rodent mothers who eat their own newborns when under stress - is not going to increase chance of prion infection.

Unlike humans who eat other humans - a very unpopular practice - and a recent practice of feeding cows a mixture of up to 10 percen cow blood with their traditional plant-based foods... the females are not being introduced to a novel self-replicating molecule stream in the rodent mother case.

A recent report pointed out incidents of polar bears resorting to cannibalism as their supply of food dwindles. That might have long-term impact on polar bears if the incidents increase at the same time the population size decreases. Recursive probability series function.

Bloomberg.com: U.K.:

A study of an epidemic caused by cannibalism indicates the human form of mad-cow disease may incubate for more than 50 years before developing into the fatal illness, researchers said in a medical journal.

The findings suggest the eventual size of a variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease epidemic may be much bigger than previously thought, U.K. researchers including John Collinge of the University College London wrote in this week's The Lancet.

Many taboos have a very sound basis in scientific fact.

Apparently, ants eat their dead quite a lot. Male fish are also known to eat small fry, even of their own species.

Prion diseases, once they become present in these species, should theoretically become kind of rampant.

In the case of ants and other social insects that create colonies, most of the members of the colony do not participate in breeding at all. So, they are probably less affected. That is, unless they feed the dead to their queens.

It would be interesting to see if they have such a practice under normal or certain special conditions. My guess would be that they probably do not, at least not under normal conditions.

posted by John Collins @ 8:20 AM