Why “ecologically realistic food”? And which types of realism are you going to pick?
Overfeeding and obesity are common problems in pets, which are mostly not bred to gain weight the way cows are.
My family has kept many kinds of animals. If you give bunny rabbits as much veggies as they want, a large fraction becomes obese. And guinea pigs too. And for their own favorite foods, tropical fish do too. Cats too.
In fact, I have never noticed a species that doesn’t end up with a substantial fraction with obesity, if you go out of your way to prepare the most-compelling food to them, and then give that in limitless amounts. Even lower-quality, not-as-compelling foods free-fed can cause some obesity. Do you even know of any animal species like this?!
If there is large variation in susceptibility (which there would be) to the ostensible environmental contaminant, there should be species that you can free-feed and they don’t get obesity.
These sorts of observations sound promising for someone’s potential as a forecaster. But by themselves, they are massively easier to cherry-pick, fudge, omit, or re-define things, versus proper forecasts.
When you see other people make non-specific “predictions”, how do you score them? How do you know the scoring that you’re doing is coherent, and isn’t rationalizing? How do you avoid the various pitfalls that Tetlock wrote about? How do you *ducks stern glance* score yourself on any of that, in a way that you’ll know isn’t rationalizing?
For emphasis, in this comment you reinforce that you consider it a successful advance prediction. This gives very little information about your forecasting accuracy. We don’t even know what your actual distribution is, and it’s a long time before this resolves, we only know it went in your direction. I claim that to critique other people’s proper-scored forecasts, you should be transparent and give your own.
EDIT: Pasted from another comment I wrote: