Title kinda says it all.
I was watching some animal rescue videos and the animals were often in bad shape due to parasites of various kinds slowly killing them. Presumably there was no underlying problem with the animal before it got infested. So, why do some animals get overwhlemed while others seem to have no problems at all? Just bad luck it walked past a bush with a lot of ticks or ate something with ringworms?
Or passed on by related animals, or curled up/mated with an infected/infested animal, or a weakened immune system or poor general health.
I cannot cite this but I’ve seen feral hogs have so many ticks and various pestilence that any other animal would be dead by lack of blood in a day. Yet, they are feisty, fast and mean as heck, still.
Seem to eat, run, mate and fight with great regularity.
Some other animals are more fragile, babies, aged and sick animals often get overloaded. And can die.
It’s wild out there.
Ringworm is a skin disease, easily transmissible by direct contact. I got it from a friend’s cat many years ago. It’s relatively harmless, unless it covers a huge portion of the body, and like other fungal infections, it can be very dangerous if a person (or animal) is immune compromised, which starvation or depletion by blood-sucking insects can also do.
I’ve seen cat rescue videos where the flea infestation was so severe, the water turned red with all that “flea dirt”, which is digested blood.
They all do, or are equally likely to. But for wild animals which are debilitated by parasites, survival rates plummet.
Where existence is “hand to mouth” and if they are not at near optimal fitness they can’t feed themselves, become prey or can’t catch sufficient prey.
Right, and if some animals have resistance to those parasites, then they’ll exhibit better survival and presumably them and their offspringi will produce more children, and so forth.
As far as the rescue videos go, I’d bet they were malnourished as part of their abuse, and that makes it all the easier for heavy infestations of flees and whatever else to take hold.
I had a little of 13 German shorthaired pointers one year. We were having a bad flea year, so every day when I came home from work, I would deflea them with malathion. 1/2 of the litter was not infested, while the other half was. Same dogs every day. I believe there is a genetic component to it.
Um… most wild animals are chock full of parasites.
People can definitely, for a number of reasons, be attractive/repellent to mosquitoes. Speaking of which, the sickle cell trait also has a protective effect against malaria, and I’m sure there are similar conditions that affect animals.
Deer ticks can weaken the animal. I have wondered why some deer avoid them and others get infested.
All the insults are cumulative.
Have ticks? You’re weakened by them and hence more prone to fleas, intestinal parasites, disease, and if a predator, starvation.
Have a hard time catching prey if a carnivore or chewing your food if a herbivore? You’re weakened due to caloric deficit and hence more prone to ticks, fleas, disease and intestinal parasites.
Have intestinal parasites? You’re more prone to ticks, fleas, disease, and starvation.
The end effect is most animals have mild cases of all those things, but a few animals really suffer down the road of exponential decay with all of them.
I think this. You only see the real sick ones. But they are sick to a degree.
As noted all wild animals are infested with parasites. Sometimes parasites so specific they only effect one specific species of animal. One mental image that stuck with me was an anecdote (might have been from David Mech) of a deer so covered with blood-sucking parasites in the winter that after it got up from a lie-down the surrounding snow was heavily-flecked with blood.
To anthropomorphize, nature doesn’t give a shit if you die of parasite-load or cancer or hoof-rot or tooth-loss by year five, if you’ve successfully reproduced (by whatever metrics) before then. Generally the older and more in physical decline an animal is, the worse the parasite load. But some can live many years with just a perpetual host of mange, fleas, ticks, liver flukes, heart worms, inimical blood protozoa, and a million other things even excluding stuff like arthritis and tooth pain. It’s probably not comfortable, but it’s a living.
It’s yet another reason why the idolization of animals “in their natural state” is a little overblown. Life free in nature sucks mightily in many ways for every creature - ‘nasty, brutish and short’
It’s not as if humans are parasite- and chronic disease-free, yet many of us survive.
All those smaller things deserve to eat and to survive just as much as the larger host critter.
Nature greatly favors quantity over quality. Sucktastic though that may be by modern human lights.