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Originally posted by kimish
reply to post by loner007
I do have this for you because many many sites say that gorillas are STRICTLY vegetarians. Keep in mind that gorillas are very secretive and we still know very little of them but this may, and I believe to be fact, as to why gorillas have canines...news.nationalgeographic.com...
There may well be more mundane explanations for the surprising finding—explanations that'd have to be ruled out before gorillas could be reclassified as meat-eaters, said study co-author Grit Schubert, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. For example, gorillas are known to eat ants that scavenge the carcasses and bones of monkeys and other mammals. When gorillas eat the ants, they may also be ingesting—and later expelling—the mammal DNA in the ants' digestive tracts, the study authors speculate. Another possibility is that the mammal DNA came from live monkeys or duikers that had been probing the gorilla feces for edible seeds or other leftover plant bits. Or the mammals "might have just licked it, sniffed it, or peed on it," Schubert said. "There's plenty of opportunities" for adding mammal DNA to gorilla scat after the fact, Schubert said. "I don't really think they're eating meat."
The study also found that men and women who ate diets heavy in animal-based proteins had higher averages BMIs and were more likely to smoke.