History CripplingOverspecialization / RealLife

* Creator/ECComics star "Ghastly" Graham Ingels is considered one of the best horror comic artists in history... unfortunately he specialized a little ''too'' much in horrible grotesque imagery; when [[UsefulNotes/TheComicsCode horror comics got banned in 1950s America]], he was unable to adapt to a more family-friendly style, and his career quietly died.

** The kākāpō is a parrot endemic to New Zealand. Its only predators, once upon a time, were airborne raptors that hunted almost exclusively by sight-- so it evolved to forage on the ground, with camouflaged plumage, staying still when a predator appeared (to better blend in), and eventually lost its ability to fly. This worked very well... until humans came to New Zealand in the late 13th century and introduced land-based, keen-smelling predators such as dogs and rats. The kākāpō's "stay on the ground and hide" strategy was absolutely useless against these new threats, and it was almost driven to extinction. It's also slow-breeding, just to make things worse. As of February 2024, exactly 247 kākāpō remain alive.
** One of the airborne raptors that the kākāpō had to deal with was Haast's eagle, by some measures the largest flying bird to have lived, with the larger females weighing up to 35 lb/16 kg. However, it usually hunted larger birds. ''MUCH'' larger birds. As in the moa, a group of flightless birds; the smallest was about the size of a turkey, while the two largest species were as large as 12 feet tall and over 500 pounds (3.6 m, 225+ kg). The Māori hunted all of the moa species to extinction within about 100 years of their arrival, leading to the extinction of Haast's eagle.

* The Confederacy during UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. Their economy was so focused on cash crops like cotton and tobacco that there was exactly ''one'' factory capable of producing cannons. There wasn't enough arable land to maintain cotton production for tax revenue ''and'' grow the food to support an army. Even with the government building railroads, laying telegraph lines, and confiscating food from private farms for the war effort, the Confederate army was often malnourished and always short on manufactured goods like uniforms and guns. The problems of supply facing the Confederate army were so acute that [[http://civilwartalk.com/threads/soldiers-shoes.73013/ some historians have suggested]] that the Battle of Gettysburg was precipitated by a Confederate brigade's attempt to raid a shoe warehouse.\\\
** Ironically, the Confederacy went into the war thinking that this trope would help them. They believed that they had such a stranglehold on world cotton production that Britain and France would have to intervene on their side in order to keep their textile mills running, and that Northern industry's dependence on Southern cotton would bankrupt their economy and lead them to sue for peace. Pro-secession Southern demagogues in the run-up to the Civil War referred to it as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton "King Cotton"]].\\\
** Unfortunately for them, they found that the Union and their potential European allies were ''not'' as cripplingly overspecialized as they had hoped, as the Indian and Egyptian cotton industries were quite able to pick up the slack once Confederate exports were shrunk by Northern attacks. ** Furthermore, the UK had been stockpiling cotton reserves over the last few years, sensing the growing instability in the US, a move that was assisted by the bumper crops that the South had been producing in the late 1850s. Also, while British needed Southern cotton, it also depended on the North for a quarter of its food supply, so intervention in support of the Confederacy could have easily led to famine. Thus the famous final statement that King Corn was stronger than King Cotton. And for good measure, Britain and France had both recently ended slavery in their home countries and therefore had very little political will to be seen supporting a country whose main goal was maintaining slavery.

Ironically, the Confederacy went into the war thinking that this trope would help them. They believed that they had such a stranglehold on world cotton production that Britain and France would have to intervene on their side in order to keep their textile mills running, and that Northern industry's dependence on Southern cotton would bankrupt their economy and lead them to sue for peace. Pro-secession Southern demagogues in the run-up to the Civil War referred to it as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton "King Cotton"]].\\\
Unfortunately for them, they found that the Union and their potential European allies were ''not'' as cripplingly overspecialized as they had hoped, as the Indian and Egyptian cotton industries were quite able to pick up the slack once Confederate exports were shrunk by Northern attacks. Furthermore, the UK had been stockpiling cotton reserves over the last few years, sensing the growing instability in the US, a move that was assisted by the bumper crops that the South had been producing in the late 1850s. Also, while British needed Southern cotton, it also depended on the North for a quarter of its food supply, so intervention in support of the Confederacy could have easily led to famine. Thus the famous final statement that King Corn was stronger than King Cotton. And for good measure, Britain and France had both recently ended slavery in their home countries and therefore had very little political will to be seen supporting a country whose main goal was maintaining slavery.

** Koalas. They are specialized to eat the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, and practically nothing else, which poses a major issue since the leaves are not only low in nutritional value, but also straight-up ''poisonous''. So to cope with its unsavory diet, the koala evolved...a very small and uncomplicated brain, since a bigger brain would require a lot of energy to function, which a koala simply doesn't get in its diet. This has the unfortunate consequence of koalas being very behaviorally inflexible, as their brains are literally incapable of learning new things: if eucalyptus leaves, which koalas feed on by plucking them from branches, are removed from the tree and placed on a flat surface or in a bowl or dish, the koala will not eat them because ''it no longer recognizes them as food.'' (This has let to quite a bit of MemeticMutation involving "Koalas are stupid and terrible animals" rants online.)

* Professional bodybuilders have their workouts revolve around having massive, well-defined musculature. However, this causes problems if they try to do anything else. Having ''large'' muscles is not the same as having ''strong'' muscles. This is why powerlifters and weightlifters, who do have to be strong, don't look like bodybuilders. Large muscles can reduce flexibility required in other activities, the amount of energy necessary to put into workouts means they often don't have the energy to do anything else, and they have pay attention to details like body fat composition and fluid retention that others athletes don't have to care about because bodybuilding is based on appearance. In short, if you intend to become a top bodybuilder, that's essentially ''all'' you can do. However, many bodybuilders do come from the powerlifting ranks (most famously Ronnie Coleman), and nearly all bodybuilders look more like a typical weightlifter during their "offseason", when they are eating big and lifting their heaviest.

** Cheetahs, specializing in ultimate sprinting, have a very light build and not much strength compared to other large African predators. Against lions, hyenas, leopards and hunting dogs, all a cheetah can do is run. When it comes to prey, anything larger than a Thomson's gazelle is off-limits to most cheetahs (some males can become large and robust enough to take down yearling wildebeests). However, it may be subverted, as some cheetahs have learned to bring down larger prey by hunting in groups. Cheetah mothers sometimes have their cubs eaten by baboons, being unable to defend them. While baboons have an impressive build and sharp teeth, this is not something they could get away with against, for instance, a leopard. The other drawback of the speed is win or lose, the burst of speed leaves the cheetah too tired to do ''anything'' to the point that other predators can survive off stealing their kills, so the individual cheetah is always living off ''just enough'' meat to get by, if even that. That said, cheetahs do up their chances of being able to eat in peace by doing much of their hunting midday, when most large predators are less active.

** The saiga is a species of steppe-dwelling antelope, which is a grazer adapted for the arid, temperate grasslands. However, it's ''incredibly specialized'' for ''only'' this environment, making it nearly impossible to rear in captivity and highly susceptible to the smallest changes in its habitat. Captured wild adults would repeatedly run into the walls of their pens until they died, simply because they did not understand the concept of a barrier they could not go around. Even those few that workers could keep from ramming themselves to death, would be mass killed by predators that should otherwise be harmless to an animal their size, like crows or foxes, simply because saiga do not understand that they can defend themselves by fighting back; their ''only'' defence is to run. Several times, captive saiga choked to death because they did not know how to chew food chunks into smaller pieces, since they feed only on dry grasses and small shrubs in the wild. Higher than average humidity also wrecks havoc on their population, as they are extremely vulnerable to bacterial infections; frequently, significant portions of their species are wiped out by plagues, sometimes more than ''half'' of the entire species, causing massive population swings in a matter of months. Only the fact they are {{Explosive Breeder}}s by antelope standards keeps them alive, although their range has declined to small pockets of Central Asia while they stretched across the entire Northern Hemisphere during the last ice age.