What These Birds Can Teach Us About Aging Gracefully

[Buster's Uncle]

What These Birds Can Teach Us About Aging Gracefully
Takepart.com
By Todd Woody | 5 hours ago



Most animals don’t live long enough to experience the debilitating effects of old age. But some critters survive for decades, and one in particular, the thick-billed murre, manages to grow old without losing its physical prowess, scientists have found.

The research could shed new light on the aging process in other wildlife—and perhaps in primates like humans.

The murre inhabits the far northern reaches of the globe and spends as much time in Arctic waters as it does in the air, diving to depths of 300 feet or more and flying through the sea to hunt fish and other prey. Murres can live 25 years or more, and while scientists from Canada and France discovered that the birds do slow down with age, they don’t lose their diving ability.

“We found no effect of age on dive depth, dive shape or behavioral aerobic dive limit, the authors wrote in the paper published in the journal Functional Ecology. “Physiological changes occurred in tandem with advancing age in murres, but offset each other such that there was no detectable decline in behavioral performance.”

Kyle Elliott, a biologist at the University of Manitoba and a lead author of the paper, said that most research on animal aging focuses on short-lived creatures like worms, laboratory rats and fruit flies. By studying animals whose lifespan is closer to our own, scientists can glean more insight into how the physical deterioration that accompanies old age affects their ability to survive. 

“I'm not sure our study on wild birds is directly translatable to a North American couch potato, but I think it might be very translatable to primates in the wild—including our hunter-gatherer ancestors or people that work intensively physically—and may give an idea of the context under which our own aging patterns evolved,” Elliott said in an email. “Although there were changes in physiology with age, those changes tended to offset one another such that behavioral performance was maintained into old age. Perhaps reduced physical capacity was offset by increased experience.”

Elliott and his colleagues studies thick-billed murres on Coats Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. They captured the black-and-white birds in their nests and attached devices to their legs and backs that recorded the depth and length of their ocean dives.

The researchers measured a decline in the birds’ metabolism, oxygen stores and thyroid levels as they aged but not in their diving performance. For humans, that would be like being able to run a four-minute mile well into your 70s.

It’s not exactly clear why old murres can keep diving like youngsters but the scientists said the aging birds may be conserving energy not related to reproduction for foraging for food.


http://news.yahoo.com/birds-teach-us-aging-gracefully-211043191.html