How many insects should Simba eat each day to survive in the jungle?

One of the scariest and traumatic parts of “The Lion King” is when Scar kills Mufasa, banishing little Simba from his own kingdom. The young lion wanders lost until he meets Timon and Pumbaa and learns from them the philosophy of Hakuna Matata. The new friends teach him that he doesn't have to feed on meat to survive: he can eat insects! “Sticky but tasty, ” they point out.

But would an insect-only diet be enough for a growing lion? The question has stirred the Reddit forum and its users seem to have reached a consensus: Simba should eat an insect every 10 seconds and never sleep! It would take about 9, 000 pets a day to keep his diet balanced.

This calculation was based on the amount of meat a lion eats per day, which is between 4.5 and 11 kg. The average weight of an insect is just over 1 gram; so just do the math to find out that Simba would have to eat between 3, 780 to 9, 450 larvae every 24 hours. Enough, right?

Most pessimistic calculation

Another user has reached 24, 000 crickets a day to replace Simba's diet. He made the calculation through the daily amount of meat a lion eats if it came from zebras alone. He then calculated the amount of calories in each pound of flesh of the striped animal to know how many crickets would be needed to replace them.

To make matters worse, this same user went even deeper into his analysis: since lions sleep an average of 20 hours a day, they would only have 4 hours to go after their food source and ingest their new prey. That would give almost two insects ingested every second without wasting time searching!

Of course the above calculation was made based on the calories of a cricket. Simba's hunt would have worked better if he found only caterpillars, for example, but could he? It would have been easier to have devoured Timon and Pumbaa, but that would create trauma in children that not even the best psychologist could solve.

* Posted on 10/14/2016

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