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#No wonder her daughter Sorrel has a thing about worms lmaoo
bonefall · 3 months
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are amphibians like newts and frogs considered aquatic? i know crustaceans & mollusks would be
Yes they are! Generally, the more time it spends on land, the closer it will be to 5 calories than 4. The estimate was actually based on frogs and tadpoles, I had to make an educated guess.
My best source was a feeding chart from a reptile food website which sells whole small prey for consumption by snakes. It perfectly lists out the values of dozens of small animals, but no fish. So I took a note of the 4 calorie estimate, observed that an adult frog increases in calories compared to tadpoles (bucking the trend with the others on the list where younger animals are worth more caloric value) and went on to do more research
I couldn't find a source that broke down WHOLE prey caloric value like the chart, so I ended up comparing caloric value between rabbit fillets, chicken fillets, and fish fillets on human-centric nutrition websites. My hypothesis was mostly consistent, even with more species added. Fish (perch, flounder, pike) < Wild Mammal (rabbit, squirrel) < Poultry (chicken, turkey, quail). There was overlap between "classes", certain fish getting over the 100 hump, but generally there was a trend I boiled down into 4/5/6
This is consistent with how a lot of fish meat is actually water. In fact, cats quench a lot of their thirst from the food they eat. I also learned some very interesting stuff about the fat distribution in fish which is going to blow a bit of a hole in some of my Clan culture stuff lmaoooo, but I'll furiously swim across that obliterated bridge when I get there
But funfact! Fish oil is rendered fish fats and it is the form that unsaturated fat takes, whereas lard is what saturated fats become. I need to do more research into this topic to understand what kind of difference it would make in a wild cat's diet.
There was one big bucked trend though: salmonid meat was WAAAAY higher in fat and calories. Like, absurdly high. Like 150 cal trout fillet vs 110 cal of rabbit fillet vs 88 cal of perch fillet.
I do not know why that is. My guess is that maybe it's because they were taking the number from farmed salmonids? Maybe it's because they're particularly fatty fish? Perhaps this is just the raw power of salmon slammin'.
Anyway, at one point I was trying to estimate exact caloric value per popular prey species, but decided I didn't have the "backing" to get so exact with the numbers since I was doing estimates with the fish. I'll do the work if it comes down to it, but for now, 4/5/6 is a quick, easy guideline you can use for just about any WC project.
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