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Science Quickly

Adult Daughter Orcas May Trigger Moms' Menopause

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2017

⏱️ 2 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Competition between older female orcas and their adult daughters when they can breed simultaneously may cause the matriarch to enter menopause.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

0:22.7

.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

0:33.6

This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

0:39.1

I'm Karen Hopkins. Got a minute?

0:42.9

Menopause marks the end of a female's baby-making era.

0:44.3

And not just for humans.

0:47.2

Female killer whales go through menopause too.

0:52.0

And a new study finds that they might get pushed into menopause by their up-and-coming daughters.

0:54.2

Those findings are floated in the journal Current Biology. Female orcas usually quit popping out calves between the ages of 30 and 40,

1:00.5

yet they can live to be more than 90 years old. One granny orca, who recently dropped from

1:06.0

researchers' radar and is, sadly, presumed to have passed, was thought to be 105. But why would a female whale stick around for so long after she's done adding to the gene pool?

1:16.6

One theory is that it pays to keep Nana around so she can help care for the younger members of her family group.

1:22.6

Indeed, matriarchal orcas do spend a lot of time nurturing their descendants.

1:26.6

But that doesn't explain why the old spend a lot of time nurturing their descendants.

1:31.3

But that doesn't explain why the old gal should stop having babies of their own.

1:37.0

To dive deeper into that issue, researchers examined 43 years' worth of demographic data on two populations of killer whales in the Pacific Northwest.

1:41.3

The records track the ages and genealogical relationships of the resident

1:45.1

orcas, including 525 calves. Turns out that when mothers and daughters breed at the same time,

1:52.4

the calves of the elder females, for reasons yet unclear, are almost twice as likely to die by the age of

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