Non-Human Animal Menopause

An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.

- Cobb, Inception (The Movie)

It really doesn't matter if one is scientifically "savvy" or not. Ideologies block the head and make one a living example of Dunning–Kruger effect. In other words, one becomes a moron with no self awareness. Being a moron is destructive since it unleashes so much pain and sufferings. 

Here's another example of humans not accepting a simple fact about non-human animals while in the process causing so much pain and suffering on them. It just baffles me what they accomplish by living inside their head?

In 1981, Helene Marsh and her mentor discovered the truth about a basic biological process—but it took many researchers years to accept it.

Helene March stood in front of a hotel conference room filled with other marine mammal researchers. It was December 1981, and the Australian scientist had spent years working with her mentor, Toshio Kasuya of the University of Tokyo, studying reproduction in short-finned pilot whales: dark, round-headed animals about the length of a pickup truck. She had big news.

At the time, scientists thought that wild animals did not live beyond their reproductive years. But Marsh and Kasuya had been studying samples collected from some 300 short-finned pilot whales: Marsh had examined their ovaries, while Kasuya determined each animal’s age by counting growth rings visible in cross-sections of their teeth. When they combined their data, they found that female short-finned pilot whales stopped reproducing around the age of 36, but still lived for about 14 years more. For the first time ever, Marsh and Kasuya had discovered menopause in a non-human animal.

Despite the breakthrough finding, which challenged our understanding of a fundamental biological process, reaction to her talk was less than positive. “The mainly male audience was quite scathing,” Marsh says. “They couldn’t believe that there would be females in a population that had stopped breeding, because the reason they were there was to breed.”

More than 40 years later—with science now firmly on her side—Marsh remembers some of the comments in the wake of her talk, including: “‘This cannot be true. There would be no point in the females remaining alive if they weren’t reproducing.’”

“It was,” Marsh says calmly, “incredibly sexist.”

The reaction of Marsh’s audience was not surprising. After all, conventional thinking throughout science and the Western medical establishment at the time was that humans were the only species where the females lived beyond their reproductive years.

“We’ve been told that only through the grace of modern medicine—vaccines, surgery, antibiotics—are women are living long enough to experience menopause,” says gynecologist and obstetrician Jen Gunter, author of The Menopause Manifesto. “Nobody ever says that about men, that because of vaccines they are living long enough to have erectile dysfunction.”

“For so long, menopause has been viewed through this lens of failure, that there couldn’t be any medical use for it,” Gunter adds. “While most animals do die after their reproductive life is over, finding animals that keep living and thriving is more proof that this is a natural process, that they evolved to live past their reproductive function.”

[---]

Marsh and Kasuya’s finding, eventually published in an International Whaling Commission report rather than a science journal, never attracted media attention. But in 2012, University of Exeter researchers reported that orcas, or killer whales, also experience menopause. Their research was picked up by multiple outlets, including The New York Times and the BBC. Subsequent papers documented menopause in false killer whales, narwhals, and beluga whales.

University of Exeter’s Darren Croft, the senior scientist for the killer whale research, acknowledges the ground-breaking impact of Marsh and Kasuya’s discovery for his field. “This paper, published in the ’80s, showing that we have a wild population of pilot whales where the females live well beyond their reproductive years, was the first and only evidence of that until the data started to mature on the resident killer whale studies,” says Croft, adding that more recent research on menopause in toothed whales, including orcas, builds on Marsh and Kasuya’s findings in short-finned pilot whales. “The original discovery is fundamental,” Croft says.

Marsh went on to have an exemplary career in scientific research, education, and conservation. She is an award-winning, internationally recognized expert in dugongs and marine conservation and, in 2021, was recognized as an Officer of the Order of Australia, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors. But in all the praise heaped on her work, there isn’t a word about short-finned pilot whales.

“I think I did other stuff that was more important from a conservation and policy point of view,” says Marsh, who still teaches and has a hand in science-based conservation work. “From a theoretical biology point of view, the pilot whale post-reproductive work was the most interesting thing I ever did.”

I have personally read so many research papers and even books "claiming" that human females live beyond their reproductive years to groom their offsprings (think - grand mother's wisdom). I have also read, elephants with missing older matriarch find it hard to survive during drought times and don't know to avoid lion territories because they lack the wisdom of their older matriarch. If it's not obvious, the experience of older human animal and non-human animals brings in a wisdom for survival during tough times.