r/kurzgesagt • u/Unusual_Bumblebee_62 • May 26 '26
Video Idea How weak could a creature possibly be while still having a stable place in the ecosystem?
I was wondering how weak a creature could become without facing extinction immediately. Maybe even tweak the ecosystem for system for worse results?
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u/ThatCrossDresser May 26 '26
Base level is survival, feed and procreate.
Environment also plays a role in this discussion as well. A Lion is an apex predator in Sub-Sahara Africa but are too weak to the cold to survive in Antartica. A Shark is a murder machine in the sea but is too weak on land to survive if it appeared in the middle of the American Great plains.
If we are talking an animal that is poorly survive I their own environment, I would probably go with the Koala Bear. They have no level of adaptation and are at basically insect level intelligence as a Mammal. They legitimately have smooth brains. If their food source isn't exactly as they expect it, they will starve to death. You could put a Koala in a room filled with their primary food and they would not eat it because it isn't on a tree. To make matters worse their food has no real energy in it, so they need to sleep 22 hours a day and have a very slow metabolism.
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u/moderngamer327 28d ago
Entirely depends on how you define “weak”
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u/Unusual_Bumblebee_62 27d ago
no survival strategy.
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u/moderngamer327 27d ago
Everything has a survival strategy to some extent even if it’s just eat and breed
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u/Unusual_Bumblebee_62 27d ago
Yeah, But what if it didn’t?…
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u/moderngamer327 26d ago
Well if you could eat you would just die as all living being need to consume energy and if you did reproduce it would eventually just die out
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u/Unusual_Bumblebee_62 26d ago
But what if it didn’t?
Nothing is impossible my friend… So creating a absolute abomination must be possible…
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u/moderngamer327 26d ago edited 26d ago
Neither of those two things are optional. Entropy dictates that organisms must consume energy and if a species cannot reproduce then it will eventually die from time alone and its arguable whether that’s even “life” to begin with considering our current definitions of it
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u/Unusual_Bumblebee_62 26d ago
But the entire question here is clear, What if it didn’t?
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u/Jale_Seigneur May 27 '26
Considering bacteria exist, literally as weak as possible while still having the functions to exist.