Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:
Consider for a moment the blue whale. Weighing up to 200 tons, this majestic creature is believed to be the largest animal that has ever existed on planet Earth. It also has a remarkably long lifespan of 100 years or even more.
In theory, the blue whale should be highly susceptible to cancer: It has quadrillions of cells that could acquire the requisite oncogenic mutations, and its extended lifespan provides plenty of time for this to occur. In fact, when researchers applied an equation for estimating human colorectal cancer risk to a whale-sized organism, it predicted that virtually all blue whales would develop this form of cancer by age 80.1 Conversely, the same equation scaled down for mice predicted that they would essentially never get colorectal cancer, even if they lived for 90 years. This is, of course, not the case. Despite their brief lifespans, mice have a one to four percent chance of developing this type of cancer, similar to the human lifetime risk of about four percent.2,3 And while the exact incidence of colorectal cancer in blue whales is not known, it is certainly not 100 percent.
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