#in cephalopods it colonizes skin lesions and spreads to the everything i think? and in humans it infects wounds and also fucks ur stomach

[clannfearrunt]

Actually I wasn't expecting this to get rb'd around so I don't think I made some things clear enough so I wanna address some stuff!

#man that adds extra horror to all those infection aus too #they literally have no immune defenses #damn does this mean in any 'last surviving human' aus they'd all die out because of whatever pathogens the human would have (tags via @smithy-will-eat-your-babies)

Cephalopods (and other invertebrates) DO have a perfectly good innate immune system!! It's adaptive immunity that they don't have. Adaptive immunity is thought to have evolved in jawed fish approximately 500 million years ago, and also in jawless fish independently as well apparently. Things like idk a frog, human, a shark, the powerful lumpfish, we all have this awesome adaptation! In addition to our innate immune response, we also have the ability to adapt to new pathogens and remember them when we encounter them again.

So to explain the difference (as I understand it- if I make any mistakes pls feel free to chime in) and why I was horrified:

The innate immune system is like, the Default Defense you were born with. It's the part of your immune system that looks at a foreign invader and goes UNAUTHORIZED FUCKING THING. BLOW IT UP NOW. Most living things are gonna be pretty decent at this. You have to be, to keep on being a living thing on this Earth. The functions of the innate immune system are genetic, and it does not improve with experience. If you happen to meet a pathogen that has evolved to survive whatever default defenses you were born with, then well. That's that. There's also the risk of managing to fight off an infection, only to immediately be re-infected by the same fucking thing you just fought off, and you start the fight alllll over again the exact same way you just did, with no improvements, because your immune system cannot remember Who this intruder is and how to tailor its response to it specifically. An important thing to remember, though, that not everyone has the same genes, so Squid A might still have been born with a stronger immune system than Squid B, and survive an illness that Squid B might die from. Unless you have a population with very little genetic diversity, like, say, maybe if your country had a habit of cloning soldiers off of tentacle cuttings or something silly like that, then you're prooobably not just going to have everyone wiped out from One Disease. Also, innate immunity within a population can improve over time, but it'll be over the course of generations, not within an individual person.

The adaptive immune system is the part that can learn to identify invaders it's seen before. It's that system of target-tailored antibodies and other fancy shit that makes fighting an infection more efficient. You know how when a human child gets chicken pox once, and then once they recover from that they'll never get sick from chicken pox again? Or how you can get vaccinated against various terrible, deadly diseases, and it'll let your body know how to fight off a real infection without nearly killing yourself in the process? That's adaptive immunity in action. It lets the body remember enemies it's seen before, and respond efficiently. With this ability, you're not just stuck your whole life with whatever Default Stats you happened to be born with - your defenses will improve with experience. This is a big fucking deal!!!

Like. Consider how important the invention of vaccines have been to society. We've eradicated entire deadly diseases through vaccinations. And then to consider this whole society made up of a bunch of species that don't have that option? (Though maybe with gene editing tech they might be able to, idk but that's a pretty advanced tech compared to traditional vaccines) That's horrifying!! Also, the body not being able to adapt to shit it's fought off before also means that if you don't do a good enough job sterilizing your living space after getting sick you might get caught in a death loop of being re-infected over and over until your body just can't keep up the fight anymore. Imagine getting fucking spawncamped by idk the same strain of strep throat that's still hanging out on the toothbrush you forgot to throw out. Scary!

As far as the "Inklings meet a human" scenario goes most pathogens are specific to a host so unless the human just happened to be carrying something that knows how to infect cephalopods, they'll be fine. Given how terrestrial cephalopods weren't even a thing during humantimes I would think the likelihood of a human carrying any pathogen that would know what to do with an Inkling, let alone efficiently enough to cause a significant epidemic, would be fairly slim. You could certainly play with this slim chance though, just keep in mind they're not just inherently all fucked, they do stand a chance as a population. Also remember they have access to medicine and sterilization techniques and such let's be fair 2 them in our horrible pandemic scenarios

@mosspodge said:

dang so a single deady infectious disease could reasonably take out a large portion of if not all inkfish huh. interesting interesting ✍️✍️

I initially put this at top but I reread it and yeah you've got the spirit lol. Like I said, there's still going to be differences in immune response between individuals, so it probably won't wipe out everyone. But it can easily get really bad.

I've been mulling over what this might mean for how their society handles infectious diseases though. I'll probably make its own post, but one thing that's probably taken a lot more seriously than it is in some human societies not naming any names that start with U and end in A, would be quarantining sick individuals. That's probably the very first step they recommend taking, and I would hope they take it seriously enough to actually accommodate it! It won't help much for a disease that has a contagious stage before any symptoms appear, but it's something lol

U can look into sea cucumber toxins but watch out. You might shatter some crucial underlying assumptions you were making with regards to fantasy cephalopod society epidemiology