We can learn a surprising amount from studying other species, including dolphins. Scientists have been looking at bottlenose dolphins recently to try to figure out how menopause evolved.<\/p>\n
Do dolphins even go through menopause?<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t, but their similarities to killer whales, short-fin pilot whales, and false killer whales\u2014the only mammals apart from humans to undergo menopause\u2014makes them a good study subject. After looking at data set of information about 229 female dolphins and their 562 calves over a period of 34 years, researchers found that calves born to older mothers are more likely to die by the age of 3 than calves born to younger mothers. Researchers also found that older mothers nurse their later-in-life calves longer\u20145 years on average, and occasionally up to 8 years, as opposed to the 4 years typical for earlier calves\u2014maybe to give them a better shot at surviving.<\/p>\n
So how does that give us any insight into the evolution of menopause?<\/p>\n
This kind of extended material care by older mothers might eventually evolve into an inability to reproduce past a certain age. Especially since offspring born later in life have a lower chance of surviving, it makes sense for a mother to focus her energy on the offspring she already has rather than continuing to reproduce.<\/p>\n
It seems like a lot less work, too.<\/p>\n
Read more<\/p>\n
Source<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We can learn a surprising amount from studying other species, including dolphins. Scientists have been looking at bottlenose…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":836006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,128],"class_list":["post-836005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/836006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}