how come wild animals don’t lose their teeth when there‘s no one to clean them ?

Question

Do they not have cavities all over the place ?

In: Biology

Answer 1

There are good pints already about the lack of sugary diets and animals simply dying. I would point out two more things, though.

There certainly are things that clean some animals’ teeth. Cleaner wrasse, for example, set up cleaning stations and allow “client” fish to come by and get cleaned up.

The second point has to do with teeth replacement. Most people learn a factoid when they are young about sharks replacing lost teeth throughout their lives. While this is true, this factoid sort of inverts what is common and what is uncommon. The mammal situation of having only two sets of teeth is the rare case. Most other groups of vertebrates replace their teeth as needed through their lives. So, for non-mammals, tooth problems may be solved by losing the problem tooth and replacing it with another one.