Do other animals really have advantages in terms of healing, strength and endurance?

Factual Questions
1

Hi!

Let me start by saying that I am aware that some animals which are not human obviously have adaptations which give them significant advantages, like the canine nose, the raptor’s eyes, etc.

What I’m asking for is the more subtle aspects of our bestial cousins. Time and time again, both in folklore and in modern fiction, animals’s strength, endurance and healing are lauded as something that we have lost somewhere in our evolution; case in point, the X-Man Wolverine gains many advantages simply for being ‘atavistic’.

So my question is this: Do other animals (let’s limit it to mammals to simplify things) really have better strength, endurance and healing ability? If so, what would be the mechanism in their physiology that allows this?

STRENGTH: it’s a documented fact that a Chimpanzee is vastly stronger than a human. But is this strength borne out from simply having more muscle mass and more active lifestyle (i.e. their lifestyle requires a degree of consistent exercise only found in our athletes)? And therefore would a human with the same BMI and general fitness have the same strength? Of is there something more (i.e. their muscles are fundamentally different from ours—more efficient, more packed with fibers, etc.)

ENDURANCE: bears and big-game are always shown to be able to withstand wounds such as gaping slashes and bullets with far more aplomb than us. It takes either specialized bullets or far more direct body hits to take down a beast as opposed to a human. But is this a product from simply tougher hide and more tissues (i.e. more flesh between skin and organs; more blood volume), having higher pain-tolerances (so they don’t pass out from pain like we do), or more? Would an analogous wound on a grizzly bear have the same lethality and stopping-power as it would on a human, factoring body-mass, blood-volume and other stuff aside?

HEALING: finally, the so-called ‘healing factor’. Are animals, IN GENERAL, faster at healing than us? I say in general because I’m sure there are specific animals with vastly faster healing, but do the vast majority of animals have this? Does they blood clot faster, their tissues rebuild quicker, their immune-system better? Or is it just a product of living in non-hygenic environments so they have better microbe resistance?

Hope someone can reply! This has been bugging me for a while now.

I wish everyone and their loved ones the best this day.

2

With regard to Chimpanzee strength - their skeletal structure is also arranged in such a way that they have better leverage being generated by their muscles. Our structure facilitates more fine motor movements like throwing accurately.

As for the bears withstanding bullets - if you can find a man who is the same size as a bear, I imagine he will also be able to keep standing after taking a few rounds. Hell, “normal” size people do this sometimes.

3

Thanks! So you think it’s really a matter of pure mechanics? I.e. leverage and mass?

4

Humans are animals. There’s no clear physiological difference in any particular area.

The biggest difference is that humans have big brains. Which, I think for a couple reasons, often leads them to be less committed to any particular physical trial, so they may appear weaker: the wild raccoon is (as far as it knows) fighting for his life, while the human is just screwing around and trying not to get hurt, so the raccoon seems stronger/fiercer.

Now humans are evolved to be more oriented towards endurance and precision movement, compared to most other animals, so, compared to an average random animal, humans are probably better at long-distance running, and worse at sheer strength, but that’s just due to different arrangements and proportions of what other animals have – bigger proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibers, lungs that operate efficiently while running (compared to say lizards), muscle attachments farther away from the joint (faster but weaker), etc.

Additionally, modern humans live in very different circumstances than almost any other animal. Relatively small physical demands, high quality food, comparatively sterile environments, etc. etc, so they’re going to be different just because of that (couch-potato muscles, possibly immune systems with different stressors, etc.)

5

As for Endurance, humans pretty much have the best long distance travel ability of any land mammals. Humans and canines are the only species to practice cursorial hunting, basically following prey until the have to stop from exhaustion.

6

Hi Everyone! Thanks for the comments.

Firstly, I appreciate that you mentioned that humans are animals. Note that in my original post, I took care to introduce my concept by saying “other animals” and “some animals which are not human”. And so I’ve tried to limit my question to a hypothetical dichotomy of “mammals which are not humans” and “other mammals” for the sake of this discussion.

So to clarify, it seems like the current consensus is that it’s a matter of anatomy (mass, size, leverage, proportions) and physical fitness (consistent stressors leading to a more capable body), rather than any other reason?

The reason why I asked is because of two things:

  1. I once asked a medical doctor friend of mine and she told me that the rate of healing is one wherein the hard physical/biochemical limit is something that our human rate is very far from. Therefore, on different organisms, the rate can change quite a bit, and therefore it stands to reasons that some other animals have a faster healing rate. In computer terms, their base-clock would be higher than ours. So this made me think—is this what people mean when they say ‘beasts heal faster’? If so, then therefore it must mean that a fair number of other species have a higher rate than us for this to become such a prevalent observation.

  2. One of the reasons why people shut down is simply due to pain. We go unconscious when experiencing enough pain. Even if we’re physiologically still able to continue (i.e. we still have enough blood, the organs haven’t failed yet, the muscles are still working and attached to intact bones, etc.) we would be incapacitated just from pain alone. So here is the subtlety—do other mammals have a higher pain tolerance? Or even if they had the same tolerance, they process it differently so they don’t black-out?

As for the endurance, I apologize for being unclear. When I said endurance, I mean the ability to withstand pain. Not stamina. I am aware that in comparison to other mammals, humans have great long-distance mobility and lasting power. This is what I mean earlier by saying ‘obvious adaptations’. Some animals (us included), have obvious adaptations that make us better in certain tasks.

My question was more in relation to differences that most other mammals seem to share that we do not. Key concept here is ‘most mammals’.

7

–NM

8

Thanks Shagnasty!

This is exactly what I was looking for. So it stands to reason that while it is true that anatomical arrangement, general fitness and mass (i.e. more muscles on certain areas) are a factor, on a morphological level, the tissues of the muscles themselves are different?

So if I were a mad scientist and surgically rearranged a human arm to match the proportions and mass of a chimpanzee arm, the ape would still be stronger because their muscles are different?

9

I removed my previous post because of your addendum to your OP because I thought I wasn’t addressing your questions but it looks like I was wrong.

Here is the link to the article if that did help answer your questions:

10

Correction “And so I’ve tried to limit my question to a hypothetical dichotomy of “mammals which are not humans” and “humans” for the sake of this discussion.”

11

Thanks! Any thoughts on the healing and incapacitation-tolerance/endurance areas?

12

Another factor in greater chimp strength is that they may be able to recruit more muscle fibers in a given effort. (Cite.) The trade off is that humans have better fine motor control than chimps.

The phenomenon of 'greater muscle fiber recruitment = greater strength when muscle size is constant" is true of humans as well. A beginning weightlifter in a pure strength lift like the squat or deadlift can make rapid gains in how much he or she can lift even before the muscles increase greatly in size, because being able to recruit more fibers is an ability that can be improved with practice. Much of the increase in strength in isometric exercise is due to this.

The upper limit of how many fibers you can ultimately recruit is genetically set and cannot be altered. Being able to recruit as much as 50% of the fibers in a muscle is quite rare.

Another factor is the relative proportions of the fast-twitch vs. the slow-twitch fibers in a given muscle group. I believe there are two kinds of fast-twitch and three kinds of slow twitch. But generally, fast-twitch are for movements involving acceleration, like sprinting or weight lifting, and slwo twitch is for endurance activities like marathoning. As Telemark says, in a race over twenty miles or so, humans will generally win against other animals - sweating is an efficient method of cooling. But we are not nearly as good at sprinting - even a chimp can outfoot a human over twenty feet.

About speed of healing, I am not sure. Animals in the wild either get better, or die/are killed rather quickly - it is rare for an animal to have the opportunity to have a long convalescense, which might skew the figures.

Regards,
Shodan

13

There are certainly some animals that heal faster than others. Tasmanian devils, for instance, do not bleed. They’ve got a layer of fat under their skin which instantly seals up wounds.

And we aren’t quite the best distance runners among land mammals-- Pronghorns kick our butts, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (they’re much better runners than they need to be to evade any of their predators). After them, though, wolves are about on a par with us, and horses are slightly better with a rider or slightly worse without (they can’t pace themselves appropriately).

14

It is true that the Pronghorns can run much faster and longer than they need to be able to in the current environment but I thought that question was fairly well settled. There used to be a lot more really fast top level predators around in their environment when they evolved their niche than there are today. They may not need to run as long and as fast today as they once did but it is a neutral trait now so they retained it.

15

Just for giggles, here is a female Orangutan up against a professional sumo wrestler that weighs more than twice her weight in a tug-of-war contest.

It is really hard to do strength comparisons between Great Apes and humans because the apes usually won't cooperate to their full potential and the studies that are done usually involve highly conditioned human athletes. Still, it is fairly clear that humans are the weaklings among the Great Apes.

My vision is to have something like the Olympics that doesn’t discriminate among species. As long as any individual can follow the rules, they can compete. Humans could still win many complex games but they would get absolutely destroyed in basic events like swimming and weightlifting. I don’t think Michael Phelps is such a great swimmer when I realize he could be beaten badly by a baby dolphin. A well trained gorilla would do great in weightlifting competitions. Chimps can be taught martial arts, high jumping and sprinting.

I say we open it all up to all of them and stop pretending we are anything more than JV league at best for many events.

16

HAHA imagine the furore if they had dumped the poor Orangutan into that muddy cesspool though. I say the Sumo faked it.

17

It depends on what evolutionary stresses the animal faced.

Crocodileslive violent lives in germ infested swamps. As a result their immune systems are superior. Expose a crocodile to MRSA or HIV and its immune system tears it apart.

Vultureshas a gut microbiome that can handle toxins that humans cannot handle.

The Axolotlhas regenerative abilities far beyond a human.

As for what animal heals from cuts and abrasions fastest, I don’t know. I do know for humans it depends on age. Injuries that might take you a day or two to recover from as a teenager could take weeks or longer to recover from when you are elderly.

18

You may be right about that particular stunt but orangutans really are unusually strong even if it was partially staged for effect. I am a fairly large male myself and I would not volunteer for to get tied into a tug-of-war competition with her.

However, this martial arts chimp is completely real and documented. I am not fighting him either even though he weighs about 90 pounds. He isn’t the only one either. A surprising number of chimps have been trained in martial arts and they can be really good at it. Even if they aren’t, they can still just rip your hands and face off (warning: very disturbing).The best Mike Tyson could do was punch really hard and bite an ear when he got mad.

19

They’re not mammals but ostriches are bipedal like us and can run about 40 mph, 2x faster than most humans. Here’s a funny vid of Dennis Northcutt trying to catch one.

You can find a lot of videos of tugs of war between large numbers of people and horses. In fairness to humanity, alcohol may be involved in a lot of these.

Here’s a video (warning: some blood) of a tiger practically jumping onto an elephant. I’d like to see Blake Griffin try that in the next dunk contest.

Mountain goats can climb cliff faces. Maybe a parkour enthusiast could manage something similar, but you’d have to be suicidal to try.

20

Hmm… it seems to me that it would be a mistake to exclude humans from the roster of predators, so the ability of pronghorns to outlast persistence hunting humans may well have been selection pressure for in the last fifteen thousand years or so. Particularly as it seems that there were multiple pronghorn species before humans came to North America but just the one remaining… as well as a lot of other larger land mammal species suspiciously disappearing from North America these last several millennia.

My impression is that the winner of the horse vs. best human race depends on distance, horses winning shorter races and humans winning if the race is long enough, with the crossover distance somewhere around a marathon. This may also depend on whether the rider needs the horse to live on after the race.