You see all the time images of whales and seals and other marine mammals with injuries due to boats and stuff that have healed. There was even that picture of that whale with a fin injury that was photographed 30 years later or something like that. I would think being submerged in dirty water would make those wounds dangerously infected though. Are humans just super fragile mammals and the rest can handle wounds much better?
In: Biology
> I would think being submerged in dirty water would make those wounds dangerously infected though.
What makes you think the water is dirty?
Well, ignoring the bit about dirty water for the moment–how do you know that they don’t? If a whale or whatever gets injured by a boat and then dies, the corpse will sink to the bottom of the ocean and never be seen again. There’s a degree of confirmation bias here due to that.
In the same way that most humans have ~~evolved~~ a set of defenses for “bad stuff” that is present in our environment, animals have done similar things for their environment. Some animals have biology that is simply incompatible with the “bad stuff” that surrounds them. Can’t get a blood infection if you don’t use blood, for example. Another factor is that most animals have a ‘hide’ of some sort that is very tough, and designed to ‘take damage’ and not put the rest of the body at risk. Plus, the size is also easy to leave out of the equation. A scar that is 10m long might look bad to us, but the overall damage to the body might be 1% overall.
It is easy to apply ‘human problems’ to animals, but we are honestly waaaaaay more fragile than most animals on this planet. Most animals are far more robust than humans are, even a few hours after being born. The immune system has to be, since animals have to rely on it nearly exclusively for fighting off disease. This is one contributing factor on why viruses that jump from animals to humans are EXTREMELY bad. See most of the deadly plagues of humanity. In addition to being 100% not anything that our bodies have ever dealt with, it is also assuming that it is in an animal that has a super powerful immune system–and so it hits hard, fast, and doesn’t stop.
2 things
1)they probably do die of infection, a lot, but most of these cases are probably lost in the vastness of the ocean and what you are talking about is a tiny almost impossible chance of cases that we see.
2) most injuries sustained are from predators and chances are that predators will finish the job and kill off mammals with a wound. Again the cases seen are a tiny fraction of all cases
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