What Makes a Big Cat Big?
Big cats,
the kind that keep little kids from swimming in rivers, exist out there, but
are rare and none too easy to find. The
kind of cat I’m talking about dwarfs the rest of the fish in its waters, it
makes the guys fixing the dams on the Mississippi freak out and refuse to go
back down there, it gets called “two hundred pound monster” by riverboat
captains that know how to stretch a story, and it makes people think twice
about the idea that they know about the river they spend their time on. To even begin to figure out such colossal
tanks of the depths, to find the darned things, I think it’s necessary
to know about what makes them what they are.
The simplest way to state the fundamental question is, “what makes the
big cats big?”
This question can be as simple or as complicated as you want. The deeper you dig, the more complicated it
gets. The simple version of the answer is
this – “It eats more calories than it burns on a consistent basis.” Couched within that answer are more
questions:
· Do big cats
eat bigger baitfish than other cats do?
· Do big cats
eat more/less frequently than small cats?
· Do big cats
move much?
· What physical
and/or behavioral characteristics let a big cat burn fewer calories?
· What advantage
is all that size?
· What limits do
the excessive mass of these fish put on their behavior?
· Etc…
I’ll pontificate on all these in due time, I guess the starting point for me would be to describe the physiological differences between large and small fish, then I’ll try to relate these differences to behavior and the myriad possible questions involved there.
The physics and physiology of being a BIG CAT – a few
explanations to keep in mind when you’re figuring out big cat behavior.
Genetics 101 – why are they sooo big? They’re programmed that way! Ok…well, why?!
More to
come:
Behavior of the BIGS
Eats: How big?
Locations: So…what is Optimum?
Temperature/O2 /depth/current…relationships
that matter.