Do animals have varied taste in foods within their species?
Humans differ in their food preferences. One person loves oysters, another can't stand them, etc.
What about animals? Are there any rabbits that don't like carrots? Lions that don't care for zebra? Brown Bears that won't eat fish? Panda bears that turn up their snouts at bamboo? Koalas that eschew eucalyptus leaves?
This question might seem flippant, but it's not. If there are such cases (robins that don't like worms, etc.) what do they eat instead?
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1 answer
I got your question wrong at first. Correctly considered your question is based on a false assumption however. Adult humans don't eat certain food for the simple reason that they can. You would be absolutely surprised how easily a human can change his mind when hungry :) (vegans who hunt become a thing then). For example North Korean people ate grass and tree bark to survive:
Crippling food shortages exacerbated by government policies in North Korea have caused widespread illness as thousands are forced to survive on so-called "wild foods" such as grass and tree bark, according to testimonies obtained by Amnesty International in a new report.Hwang, a 24-year-old man from Hwasung, North Hamgyong province, was homeless and lived alone from the age of nine. Foraging for wild foods was his only option to avoid starvation.“I ate several different kinds of wild foods, such as neung-jae, which is a wild grass found in the fields. It’s poisonous – your face swells up the next day. Other kinds of grass and some mushrooms are also poisonous so you could die if you picked the wrong one," says Hwang.
From Amnesty.org
This doesn't apply to children! It's a biological thing that they are picky (to prevent eating bad food).
The roots of pickiness may lie in our past. Selective eating is especially common in children, with up to 50% of children reported to be picky.1 Pickiness may have evolved to keep kids from getting sick. When children start to walk, they do not yet know which foods are safe, so avoiding unfamiliar foods can prevent the risk of poisoning as they start becoming independent.
From Brainfacts backed up with this study
Animals in the wilderness aren't in the luxurious position to choose between a served zebra, hippo or antelope (and humans shouldn't be either if you ask me). They get hungry, they hunt, they eat - simple as that. They choose whatever is the most efficient way to reduce their hunger. Imagine the lion would hunt the an antelope down, kills it and invest a huge amount of energy overall. He wouldn't do that twice just because he thinks that the zebra over there is a bit more tasty.
Don't get me wrong. This works the other way around, too. Animals are picky if they can. A common house cat may for example prefer tuna wet above dry food. This pickiness seems to be gone after a few days with the dry food only.
Also don't think that wild animals aren't picky at all. This is only true for pure taste-pickiness. Several animals don't eat specific plants or other species because it's bad for them.
Picky eating also benefits other species. A classic example is conditioned taste aversion in rats, first described by John Garcia and colleagues, who found that rats began to avoid sugar when it was paired with a stimulus that made them feel sick.
From brainfacts
Just imagine a really poor kid. Can you imagine it saying "No" to a Snickers because it's more the Mars guy? Or think about the reports about cannibalism in an emergency situation (here's a list).
The crew members of the steamship Dumaru spent three weeks adrift in a lifeboat after the ship exploded and sank in the western Pacific Ocean on October 16, 1918. Quickly exhausting their supply of food and water, they resorted to cannibalism to survive.
Hungry animals - human or not - just eat plainly everything.
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