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.
wotquery t1_j9ns0sr wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why is it that animals who live far longer lives than us have similar cancer rates? by Ornery-Code-6249
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.