英国埃克塞特大学Samuel Ellis等研究人员揭示齿鲸更年期的演变。2024年3月13日，国际知名学术期刊《自然》在线发表了这一成果。
研究人员建立并分析了一个比较数据库，以检验相互竞争的演化假说。研究人员发现，正如“长寿”假说所预测的那样，雌性齿鲸的更年期是通过延长寿命而不增加生殖寿命演化而来的。研究人员进一步发现，更年期导致雌性在不增加与女儿的生殖重叠的情况下，通过增加与孙辈和后代的寿命重叠来增加代际帮助的机会。这些研究结果为人类生活史的演化提供了一个信息丰富的比较，并证明了导致人类更年期的相同途径也可以解释齿鲸更年期的演化。
据介绍，了解更年期的演变过程和原因是各学科长期面临的挑战。女性通常可以在整个成年期进行繁殖，从而最大限度地提高生殖成功率。然而，在人类中，女性在其自然寿命结束前几十年就停止了生殖。尽管在理解人类更年期的适应价值方面取得了进展，但这些发现的普遍性仍不清楚。齿鲸是绝经期多次演化的唯一哺乳动物类群，这为在比较背景下检验绝经期如何及为何演化的理论提供了一个独特的机会。
附：英文原文
Title: The evolution of menopause in toothed whales
Author: Ellis, Samuel, Franks, Daniel W., Nielsen, Mia Lybkr Kronborg, Weiss, Michael N., Croft, Darren P.
Issue&Volume: 2024-03-13
Abstract: Understanding how and why menopause has evolved is a long-standing challenge across disciplines. Females can typically maximize their reproductive success by reproducing for the whole of their adult life. In humans, however, women cease reproduction several decades before the end of their natural lifespan1,2. Although progress has been made in understanding the adaptive value of menopause in humans3,4, the generality of these findings remains unclear. Toothed whales are the only mammal taxon in which menopause has evolved several times5, providing a unique opportunity to test the theories of how and why menopause evolves in a comparative context. Here, we assemble and analyse a comparative database to test competing evolutionary hypotheses. We find that menopause evolved in toothed whales by females extending their lifespan without increasing their reproductive lifespan, as predicted by the ‘live-long’ hypotheses. We further show that menopause results in females increasing their opportunity for intergenerational help by increasing their lifespan overlap with their grandoffspring and offspring without increasing their reproductive overlap with their daughters. Our results provide an informative comparison for the evolution of human life history and demonstrate that the same pathway that led to menopause in humans can also explain the evolution of menopause in toothed whales.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07159-9
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07159-9
Nature：《自然》，创刊于1869年。隶属于施普林格·自然出版集团，最新IF：69.504
官方网址：http://www.nature.com/
投稿链接：http://www.nature.com/authors/submit_manuscript.html
本期文章：《自然》：Online/在线发表
