IA growing body of research shows that it's not just humans who get smarter as they age, but animals as well. Largemouth buffaloes can be 127 years old, Greenland sharks can be 392 years old, and some sponges can live for more than 10,000 years. And age is not just a number. As animals grow older, they behave differently depending on their life experiences and often acquire richer knowledge of their environment, which they pass on to younger members of the group, the researchers say.
The problem is that we are killing these ancient creatures. “Earth's ancient animals are in decline,” the researchers warned in their paper. A paper was published in Science magazine Last month, we analyzed more than 9,000 peer-reviewed papers. Few animals live to old age, and those that do are the ones that are the largest or have the largest horns, antlers, tusks, etc., making them easier targets for hunting and harvesting by humans.
Removing the largest and most experienced animals can have profound effects on a population's culture and social structure. researchers warnthey advocate a new approach called “longevity preservation.”
Keller Kopp, a senior researcher and ecologist at Australia's Charles Darwin University, said much of the research on aging focuses on the negative health outcomes. “The simple idea that older people are not important to the population or the environment is actually not the whole story,” he says. The more I researched different groups of animals, the more I came across remarkable examples of the value of ancient creatures. “Everywhere I looked, there were good examples,” he says.
Primates, whales, elephants and animals that hunt in packs all have older individuals who pass on important cultural knowledge and maintain social structure, the paper said. For example, an old female elephant “Social memory” Be sensitive to potential dangers, such as determining who is friend or foe and listening to the lion's voice. Postmenopausal killer whales best at finding Salmon feeding ground.
According to the study, removing older adults can increase population instability over time and eventually cause it to collapse.
Older birds can provide better food and care for their offspring, and deep-sea corals that can be thousands of years old provide important refuge for marine mammals. Older mammals produce fewer offspring themselves, but they help their offspring reproduce and care for younger mammals. This is called the “grandmother hypothesis” of healthy populations, and was first studied in humans, but has also been studied in elephants and killer whales.
Cullum Brown, a fish biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, who was not involved in the latest study, said killing old specimens of some species was likely to be a big problem for fisheries management. catch big fish decrease collective memory of people. “The important thing here is that many important behaviors, such as movement to breeding and feeding grounds, are socially transmitted in many fish species,” Brown says.
“Imagine a fish swimming in the ocean. The chances of finding the perfect feeding or breeding site by chance are virtually zero. That's why it's so important to follow successful strategies that have been passed down through generations. “That's it,” Brown said.
Mammal mothers generally become less fertile as they get older, but this is not the case for fish and reptiles. The number of offspring a fish produces increases with age, and the chances of those offspring surviving may also increase.
“Older people are likely to harbor important cultural knowledge, so if our fisheries aim to catch these individuals, the culture will be disrupted,” Kopf says. “The problem is that once culture is lost, it's very difficult to get it back,” he added, which could explain why many fish populations have not recovered even after fishing moratoriums.
Kopf's paper not only recognizes that animals have culture, but also mentions the importance of “cultural transmission,” in which these individuals transmit their social learning to other individuals. Older people tend to accumulate the most knowledge, such as how to find water during dry periods, find safe places to take shelter, and find new food in times of scarcity.
More broadly, there is a growing recognition among conservationists that we need to pay more attention to animal social learning and culture, and how this is integrated into individual creatures. Masu. “Wisdom is a term that has definitely been used only for people, and we used that wisely in the title.” [of the study]' said Kopf.
The loss of older individuals could be a contributing factor to the endangerment of many species, he continued. “Currently not recognized [by the International Union for Conservation of Nature] However, the literature itself indicates that the loss of these older individuals may be the main cause of the decline of those species. ” For example, older elephants play important roles in social groups, but are systematically hunted for trophy status and larger tusks.
Kopf and his co-authors call for “longevity protection,” or targeted policies to protect older people. The authors state that “older animals play a critical role in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services and therefore require dedicated policy directives, political incentives and careful management.”
On a more personal level, discovering the importance of older animals led Kopf to think more about our own species. “It made me think more deeply about how the elderly are not respected in our society. Many are forgotten,” he says. This is a loss not only for the elderly themselves, but for human society as a whole, he says. “What does it bring to the modern world?”
