New research suggests certain species of whales undergo menopause to help their offspring and grand offspring.
An orca chases herrings in the Reisafjorden fjord region, near the Norwegian northern city of Tromso in the Arctic Circle, in 2019. Menopause is an evolutionary mystery. If the goal of any organism is to pass on its genes, why would a species stop reproducing years or even decades before the end of its life span?
What the researchers found was that the overall life span of the species that go through menopause was much longer than species that don’t — creating more opportunity for overlap between generations in family groups.The findings lend support to a long-standing idea called the “grandmother hypothesis” — that older females in a handful of species forgo reproducing to instead support their offspring’s offspring.
But figuring out why some mammals don’t follow that pattern is complicated. “It’s hard to understand the evolution of any trait because we don’t have a time machine,” said Sear. She has done research on thein Gambia, finding that children who had a maternal grandmother in their lives were better nourished and had a higher survival rate.Whales offered an unusual opportunity to try to piece together the reasons for menopause.
“We’re just really starting to understand and unravel the social life of these animals,” Croft said. “We’re just going to learn more and more over the coming years and coming decades as we can use new technology to understand their underwater social lives.”
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