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Comment by jdougan | Hacker News Reader

This leaves open the question of what conditions evolved that partivular tastebud configuration.

My unserious pet theory (pun intended) is there were ancient pellagic deep diving proto-cats that fed on fish. You still see traces of the swimming reflexes in the cats of Lake Van.

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(Wild speculation) what if it evolved as a mechanism to keep proto-cats near humans? It's clearly quite a successful trait for a species to become associated with humans, maybe cats evolved a taste for fish as they got closer to fishing humans?

Dogs developed new facial muscles and all sorts of other features as they evolved into a companion species. Maybe cats evolved a taste for food they could only get from us?

My assumption as an ignorant person who happens to live with cats is this: tuna contains a lot of the good things cats evolved eating but in a different form. Humans have this same issue. Tuna became something cats like because they were already wired to like the nutrients in the tuna from other sources.

Maybe it was just unused taste buds that didn't get to be utilized until making friends with the furless bipeds that were very efficient at bringing the sweet sweet fishes out of the scary water

Do the closest living wild relatives of domestic cats (or other cats) share the mutation which causes cats to prefer tuna and fish?

and during a stage of feline foetal development they have gills

I thought this was true of all mammals, but apparently it’s gill slits that mammal embryos have. I guess the difference is functional vs non-functional . . .

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