ArticleScientific reports2018
Analyses of ovarian activity reveal repeated evolution of post-reproductive lifespans in toothed whales.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 95 citations in OpenAlex.
- Menopause Averted a Midlife Energetic Crisis With Help From Older Dependent Children and Parents: A Simulation Study.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Reading hominin life history in fossil bones and teeth: methods to test hypotheses regarding its evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- How toothed whales divide up the world: phylogeny and ecology shape life-history strategies of odontocetes.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Reproductive Science Methods for Marine Mammals.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2026Review
- Studying ovarian aging and its health impacts: modern tools and approaches.Genes & development · 2025Review
- Beyond genes and environment: mapping biological stochasticity in aging.GeroScience · 2025Review
- Avoidance of reproductive conflict and the evolution of menopause in chimpanzees.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Evolution of the Human Life Cycle, Revisited.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Grandmother effects over the Finnish demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Sex bias in mortality risk changes over the lifespan of bottlenose dolphins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Temporal dynamics of mother-offspring relationships in Bigg's killer whales: opportunities for kin-directed help by post-reproductive females.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Alzheimer's disease-like neuropathology in three species of oceanic dolphin.The European journal of neuroscience · 2023Article
- Age- and sex-specific survivorship of the Southern Hemisphere long-finned pilot whale (Journal of mammalogy · 2023Article
- Reproduction and production in a social context: Group size, reproductive skew and increasing returns.Ecology letters · 2023Article
- Estimating pregnancy rate from blubber progesterone levels of a blindly biopsied beluga population poses methodological, analytical and statistical challenges.Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary and genomic perspectives of brain aging and neurodegenerative diseases.Progress in brain research · 2023Article
- Reproductive biology of female common dolphins (Marine biology · 2022Article
- Larger body size leads to greater female beluga whale ovarian reproductive activity at the southern periphery of their range.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- A long postreproductive life span is a shared trait among genetically distinct killer whale populations.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In most species the reproductive system ages at the same rate as somatic tissue and individuals continue reproducing until death. However, females of three species - humans, killer whales and short-finned pilot whales - have been shown to display a markedly increased rate of reproductive senescence relative to somatic ageing. In these species, a significant proportion of females live beyond their reproductive lifespan: they have a post-reproductive lifespan. Research into this puzzling life-history strategy is hindered by the difficulties of quantifying the rate of reproductive senescence in wild populations. Here we present a method for measuring the relative rate of reproductive senescence in toothed whales using published physiological data. Of the sixteen species for which data are available (which does not include killer whales), we find that three have a significant post-reproductive lifespan: short-finned pilot whales, beluga whales and narwhals. Phylogenetic reconstruction suggests that female post-reproductive lifespans have evolved several times independently in toothed whales. Our study is the first evidence of a significant post-reproductive lifespan in beluga whales and narwhals which, when taken together with the evidence for post-reproductive lifespan in killer whales, doubles the number of non-human mammals known to exhibit post-reproductive lifespans in the wild.
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