eli5: Does the salt water of the Oceans make aquatic Sealife less susceptible to infection?
In: 247
No. Salt water can be an effective antiseptic against *some* types of bacteria, but the ocean isn’t really salty enough to have any meaningful antiseptic effect, and the ocean is absolutely teaming with bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other organisms that can infect marine life and even land-based life such as humans. Humans can catch some really nasty infections from ocean water, and there are a number of diseases that are occur in both humans and marine mammals and can be transmitted between us.
Cetaceans get more infections in fresh water, but I don’t think salt water means fewer infections than anywhere else assuming the organism fits the environment.
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It would kill off a lot of not-ocean-based living things (including you, if you drank it for long enough), but the things that live in the ocean are, by nature, adapted to it. So the kinds of things that can infect ocean life, which obviously have to live in the sea, aren’t stopped by the salinity of ordinary seawater.
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No. Salt water can be an effective antiseptic against *some* types of bacteria, but the ocean isn’t really salty enough to have any meaningful antiseptic effect, and the ocean is absolutely teaming with bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other organisms that can infect marine life and even land-based life such as humans. Humans can catch some really nasty infections from ocean water, and there are a number of diseases that are occur in both humans and marine mammals and can be transmitted between us.
Cetaceans get more infections in fresh water, but I don’t think salt water means fewer infections than anywhere else assuming the organism fits the environment.
It would kill off a lot of not-ocean-based living things (including you, if you drank it for long enough), but the things that live in the ocean are, by nature, adapted to it. So the kinds of things that can infect ocean life, which obviously have to live in the sea, aren’t stopped by the salinity of ordinary seawater.
concentrated salt is harmful to organisms used to freshwater, but microbes in the ocean have long since adapted to it, or rather they were here first and freshwater and terrestrial microbes came after
All life in the sea evolved to tolerate the saltwater, and that includes the fish, microorganisms, and infectious agents. It may be that saltwater will kill many terrestrial pathogens, but the ones in the sea evolved to thrive in the saltwater.
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