No; elephants are a good example of animals with relatively low cancer rates.

so it's a matter of density (which is probably what grandparent was hinting at)

It might be a matter of cell count still, elephants have many extra copies of p53, one of the main cancer-suppressant genes. We have one copy, elephants have 20. So the linear correlation may still be there if you'd remove those extra copies.

https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/08/12/can-elephants-g....

Yes, but the bigger you are the bigger the tumor has to be to notably impact your health.

Quoting wiki [0]:

"Peto's paradox is the observation that, at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism. For example, the incidence of cancer in humans is much higher than the incidence of cancer in whales, despite whales having more cells than humans. If the probability of carcinogenesis were constant across cells, one would expect whales to have a higher incidence of cancer than humans. Peto's paradox is named after English statistician and epidemiologist Richard Peto, who first observed the connection."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox

Quoting a bit more topically from the same article:

>Within members of the same species, cancer risk and body size appear to be positively correlated, even once other risk factors are controlled for.

Not for whales so YMMV.

It's not consistent across species because different species have different mechanisms for averting tumor growth. But within species (certainly among humans, and I'm pretty sure also among others), more cells means more opportunities for something to go wrong and so more cancer.

Counterpoint: elephants.

Do larger elephants have less cancer then smaller elephants? If not, that's not a counterpoint.

Isn't that because the ocean water blocks radiation?

as one cause of cancer. there are many others.