Giving someone the middle finger is considered bullying ? Even after this bully beat up OP ? <| sep |> omg thank you <| sep |> people just liked it better that way <| sep |> Good question . I ' ll be honest here , this is a little beyond the depth of my knowledge on the topic and I don ' t really have the time to spend researching this much further . Here ' s what I know for sure . The gut microbiota is supposedly coming from the vagina , the placenta , andor exposure to the air . These places never have food in the sense that the GI tract does . The gut microbiota is going from one environment without human food to a different environment without human food . The nutrients and energy the bacteria need are coming from elsewhere . The bacteria that colonize the gut don ' t really choose to be there . If bacteria were people , maybe they ' d wish they could be back in the vaginaplacentaopen air . But bacteria do not have minds . They ' ll just move randomly in a way that improves the chances they ' ll come across a valuable nutrientchemical they can use and if they find enough they ' ll survive , and if they don ' t , they won ' t . But even if they could decide they would rather be in the placenta , they couldn ' t do anything to change things . ' Food ' for the gut flora is not the same as the ' food ' that you would eat as a human they aren ' t even on the same scale . The gut flora uses the strict chemical components as nourishment , taking whatever it canneeds and making it into what it canneeds . Bacteria are unbelievably varied in species and type and can get their strict chemical ' nutrients ' from a wide array of sources . Different bacteria can also put up with different types of extreme environments so it ' s not really a surprise that bacteria could survive in the gut of an unfed infant , considering some bacteria can live , e . g . , in hydrothermal vents . You could argue that humans also look for and use the strict chemical components of our food . I do think humans use less of what ' s available to them than bacteria do but more importantly , individual humans are all of a single species and individuals don ' t vary that much . The gut flora , on the other hand , is filled with many different species of bacteria , and the variation among individuals of a single bacterial species is much greater than what is seen in humans . There will be a dieout of the bacteria that can ' t survive in this new environment , but there are so many bacteria that are so different from each other that we can be certain that several will survive . The ones that do survive will be the ones to colonize the gut . What are they using for nutrients in the empty , unfed newborn gut ? I have no idea . I ' ll admit to being out of my depth at this point . I have no idea if there are metabolic wastesbyproductsproducts from human physiologic processes in the gut , nor what they might be . Maybe the bacteria of the microbiome exchange metabolic productsbyproductswaste with each other maybe the have ways of killing nearby bacteria to ' cannibalize ' their nutrients . Maybe they consume parts of the newborn ' s gut until the newborn is fed , the effect is just insignificant or immunecontrolled until beyond the time the infant would die of starvation , at which point these bacteria would just be participating in the decomposition process . Maybe I ' m totally wrong and it really is an entirely nutritionless wasteland for these bacteria , and the ones that survive are just those that form hardy spores and manage to survive until food arrives . I ' m not actually sure . Good question though ! I hope my answer helps , even if it ' s not that conclusive .