Why don’t you listen to Peter Falk describe the little joys of life and maybe you’ll calm down
Important context for this scene: Bruno Ganz is an angel who has to listen invisible to the thoughts and desires of Berliners. Actual Actor Peter Falk is a fallen angel who fell and became human because the little joys of mortal life — hot coffee in plastic cups and pencil lines and warm hands — are too good to just watch as an observer.
I love when sci-fi/fantasy writers throw in a random fact about a fictional species that actually has big repercussions for that species’ biology.
Like, there is a species in Star Trek called Saurians who are adorable dinosauroid looking dudes. They’ve had very little revealed about them despite having been mentioned as early as the original series by way of “Saurian brandy” — a drink that is so strong it can put a Klingon on their ass in one swig.
Other than that, most of what we know about them comes from snippets involving a reoccuring character on Discovery named Linus, who is mostly a comic relief character. Now the reason I bring them up is that in one episode there’s a scene where Linus is eating bamboo of all things, and I’m not sure the writers realized how telling this is about Saurian biology.
Bamboo is a damn hard food to eat, and us humans can only eat the shoots of a few species. Even then, raw consumption of shoots can lead to cyanide poisoning if you aren’t careful. We still don’t know how exactly a lot of animals that eat a lot of bamboo (bamboo lemurs, red pandas, bamboo rats, elephants, gorillas) are able to digest so much of it without getting cyanide poisoning. There is some sort of neutralization process in giant pandas involving the rhodanese enzyme that turns cyanide into the non-toxic thiocyanate that they just pee out, but the process is still poorly understood in other species.
Bamboo is also hard to digest for the same reason all grasses are; their plant wall cellulose is hard as hell to break down. Like, your choices are:
a) you do a poor job of digesting it and just spend all day eating (giant panda, red panda, bamboo lemur)
b) you grow really big and have a big gut (elephants, gorillas)
c) you only eat the parts of the plant that are easier to digest (bamboo rats)
On top of that, bamboo is loaded with silica phytoliths that are like microscopic bits of glass. These evolved to make their tissues even harder to chew and metabolize.
It’s hard to make out in the scene, but it looks like Linus is eating raw bamboo leaves. Just picking them up with his fingers and munching on them like it’s nothing. That means his teeth and/or jaws would need to be very powerful (maybe hypsodont? or maybe tooth batteries?) AND, because he’s eating it raw, he’d have to be immune to the cyanide in some way.
One explanation could be in the Star Trek Adventures TTRPG, where Saurians are said to have an ability called “Enhanced Metabolism” where theyrecoverfrom toxins faster than other species (my guess is this was meant to reference their brandy being so strong). BUT, that’s not the same thing as the immunity real bamboo eating animals seem to have. My head canon is that Saurians have a diet similar to red pandas, where bamboo-like plants are their main diet on their homeworld, but they’ll eat other stuff too when it’s available, AND they’ve evolved some way to convert cyanide into a harmless chemical they excrete, like a giant panda.
All of these whacky biology shenanigans stem (hehe) from the casual writing decision to make a supporting alien character seem weird by eating a weird thing.
