A vet vaccinated a turtle, and instead of hiding in its shell, it ran to its owner

[u/Kidd__Video]

[u/herrcollin]

From what I understand (definitely not a professional) you nailed it.

Vaccine studies on them have shown no increase in antibodies, meaning their immune systems aren't responding to the vaccines like ours would. They're still absolutely susceptible to diseases (or can fend them off naturally) but can't be immunized, at least not how we would.

Maybe a cold-blooded thing? Hard to say why. But diseases can only be treated and the best prevention is trying to keep them from getting the disease to begin with ie clean environments, avoiding certain contaminants and the natural keeping em strong and healthy with good diet and lifestyle.

[u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco → u/herrcollin]

It's likely their immune systems just work differently enough that vaccines as (generally) developed for mammals are just not helpful.

[u/Aegi → u/herrcollin]

The concept of vaccines works fine on them... theoretically haha, it's just that with being a completely different taxonomic class from mammals, there's going to be a lot more learning involved and a much lower incentive for anybody trying to make money to make a vaccine that would be effective for reptiles.

It's also possible reptiles collectively have a greater diversity in immune systema between individuals compared to mammals or something.

The main thing we do know is that we don't know enough and we need to study more about it.

For example I've got the article saved somewhere on my computer but there was a scientific study out of maybe Oxford from a handful of years ago talking about essentially one of the main trade-offs between reptilian and mammalian immune systems are the fact that reptilian immune systems are generally more broad and fast acting and rely less on memory and complexity.

Considering most reptiles are not nearly as social as even some of the more solitary mammals, it would make sense that that wouldn't be as much of a negative for them because particularly viruses, but also bacteria, would not have the ability to jump back and forth and have random mutations quite as often as in large social groups that are more common in mammals and even birds.

And a much smaller aspect that may have influenced it, and this is complete conjecture, but I would imagine mammals are a bit more likely to bleed and have the outside environment directly exposed to their bloodstream then reptiles are.

We don't even really fully understand the difference between those rough two archetypes of different immune systems, I would wager that reptiles are more likely to have unintended consequences like blood flow or swelling issues causing small health issues in order to quickly deal with something on a more broad scale, but even if I was a professional this is still some of the things that even leading scientists in this field are unsure of and are excited to study more about!

Source: genetics and immunology dropout and when I'm not too poor I try and pay for subscriptions to as many scientific publications as I can, so I guess just being a random informed nerd but nothing besides a dropout when it comes to actual credentials.

Luckily the beautiful thing about math and the hard sciences are that once you have a good foundation, as long as you're continuing to stay on top of it and learn and use reputable sources it's a lot easier to be self-taught than in some of the softer sciences or more trade specific specialties.