HONG KONG: Menopausal female orca are knowledgeable leaders who help younger members of their community find food, particularly in years in which prey is scarce, according a new study. The findings suggest that the older females end up living so long — as much as 40 years longer than male killer whales — because the knowledge they possess helps the whole group survive.
“Postreproductive individuals act as repositories of ecological knowledge,” the study’s authors write.
The study sheds a little more light on why menopause exists in the first place. Menopause (when a female loses her reproductive capabilities before death) is a really weird trait, considering that the point of life is to reproduce. And it’s rare. We know of just three species — humans, killer whales and short-finned pilot whales — whose females can live long beyond their reproductive years.
While plenty of species with close-knit social groups seem to benefit from the presence of older females (for instance, older female elephants), those elders are still able to reproduce for their entire lives.
So the study, led by senior author Darren Croft of the University of Exeter and Lauren Brent of the same institution, set out to examine why menopause may have evolved in some whales. The results were published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
“Our study is the first to demonstrate that the value gained from the wisdom of elders may be one reason female killer whales continue to live long after they have stopped reproducing,” Brent said in a statement about their findings. Researchers looked at 35 years’ worth of data from the Center for Whale Research and observed 102 individual killer whales in the wild.
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