If the mother gets eaten, the offspring in her pouch will be too. Sacrificing one to save the others and maintain the opportunity to reproduce again in the future works out from an evolutionary standpoint.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
380 points (99.5% liked)
Memes
54431 readers
819 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Remember, you only get to live once. You can also have more children.
Maybe their flight response causes them to lose control of their pouch muscles (because that’s not a priority to survive), therefore accidentally dropping their babies.
Do you know this from reading it somewhere or are you just making shit up because it makes you feel better?
Just theorizing based on the information in the body of the post. You ok dude? Must be exhausting to be mad all the time.
So, making shit up.
God forbid someone can make guesses and think of possibilities in a meme community.
correction on that last sentence. mother's want to save themselves because they don't want to die. they are not making any calculations about their own fertility.
this strategy doesn't prove to be a major evolutionary disadvantage because the mothers are proven to be fertile so there is no evolutionary pressure to remove this trait but that's an analysis a human scientist is making. not the quokka
The individual Quokka isn't making that analysis, but evolutionary selection is
Evolution doesn't work that way. It's not picking and choosing traits. It's not making analysis.
The quokka just survives to pass on that trait so it persists.
Semantics, but I would say evolution is indeed picking and choosing traits, in the sense that an algorithm picks a result. It's not some conscious being though.
semantics are important when talking about evolutionary science. especially when a large segment of the population dismisses evolution as a "theory" with little understanding of what the term "theory" means in the context of science.
Gravity is also just a "theory", that's why I float off into space some days.
yes 👍
but that's an analysis a human scientist is making. not the quokka
This is an important distinction to make in general regarding science communication about evolution. Far too often, the evolutionary process is anthropomorphized, adding confusion to the scientifically illiterate. I watched a documentary once where some biologists were in the Amazon, noticed a brightly colored fish, and opined to the camera "why would evolution do this?" That is a terrible way to communicate a scientific curiosity.
It's not that they throw them, they "accidentally" fall from the pouch
Cute
Relatable.
More where that came from lol!
-Momma Quokka
How nice of science to demand the motivation of the mother for ditching her kid.
yep, there's this weird trend to demonise cute animals.
you can't even fucking mention koalas on reddit without some arsehole telling us they all have chlamydia every 53 seconds.
according to them, all dolphins suck, all ducks are shit, and all cute little marsupials who never harmed a fly are secretly evil incarnate.
what if all humans were judged by the actions of some humans? that's a frying pan i'd rather not be in...
Well, this makes that smile diabolical.. lol
The last few memes have been bullshit about the kind of day I've been having to spend around my mother in law and thank you y'all for helping
English mother quokka, do you speak it!?
Yeet the baby!
What natural predators do quokkas even have??
Foxes and dingo
MothaQuokka you did what?!
Is this post text written by AI? It seems very, "no, but yes, but maybe". It's like it's written by an LLM trained on clickbait.