wotquery t1_j9ns0sr wrote
A good way to think of this is that animals all live roughly the same average number of heart beats. Human hearts beat say 60 times a minute and we live say 70years so that is 60•60•24•365.25•70 which is like two billion or so. Now a humming bird only lives like two years so its heart beats 35times faster. Or a tortoise lives 210 years but its heart beats a third of the human rate.
What this is getting at is mostly metabolism. And metabolism has a lot to do with cell division. And cell division has a lot to do with cancer rates.
Edit: A good question to ask is shouldn’t a blue whale have more instances of cancer because it has more cells, but cancer is also tied into the age of cells in a poorly understood way.
Ornery-Code-6249 OP t1_j9nu1p6 wrote
That was the follow up question I was going to ask actually, about blue whales and how they have more cells which sensically would make you assume its easier for them to get cancer, but as you said, it's not very well researched. I saw a while ago a kurzgesagt video which I can't find which theorised that big animals such as whales get hypertumors often which kill their cancers and create a rate more even with the rest of us. Maybe that's why.
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