The Menopause Mystery

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Speaker 1 Radio Lab is supported by Apple TV. It's 1972.
A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes. Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 1 All they have left is a life raft and each other. How will they survive? The true story of a family's fight for survival, hosted by Becky Milligan.

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Speaker 6 Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Molly Webster.

Speaker 2 Hi, I feel like

Speaker 2 I haven't seen you since like last summer.

Speaker 6 I'm sitting in for Lulu and Lativ today since we were in Michigan

Speaker 6 with our contributing editor Heather Radke. I think that's right.

Speaker 2 All right, Heather. All right.

Speaker 6 I'm going to assume you have a story to tell us.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's why we're here.
We have something to tell you.

Speaker 2 So a little while back, I had a conversation with one of Radiolab's favorite science writers.

Speaker 7 I'm Lucy Cook. I'm the author of Bitch on the Female of the Species.
And

Speaker 7 I've got a background in zoology. All right, Lucy.

Speaker 6 We do love Lucy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 She's like this globe-trotting tracker of amazing animal stories. She's been to Panama to meet stoned dwarf sloths.
She went to Sweden to track drunken moose. All right.

Speaker 7 And then a little while back, while she was working on her latest book, I was delighted to fly to Seattle and meet this population of orcas.

Speaker 2 She got wind of a pretty amazing discovery in killer whales.

Speaker 7 Yeah, this felt like a really, really important story and one that I found inspirational.

Speaker 2 It was a discovery that directly speaks to something that lots of humans are actually going to to have to contend with at some point in their lives, including Lucy herself and me and you. Me.

Speaker 2 You, Molly.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 7 So, yeah.

Speaker 2 So, Lucy hopped on a plane, flew to Seattle,

Speaker 2 and then to get to the patch of the ocean north of Seattle where the whales actually live,

Speaker 7 you get a seaplane. You get to feel like you're in a 1970s, you know, adventure TV series.

Speaker 7 That's how everybody traveled in the 1970s, was by seaplane to go and deal with emergencies, you know.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the actual reason Lucy was there was to get on a boat

Speaker 2 with a woman named

Speaker 9 Deborah Giles. So my name's Deborah Giles, Dr.
Deborah Giles, but I just go by my last name, Giles. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I'd written to her offering up my services to join her on her research boat because I'd heard that she went out every day chasing orcas trying to catch their poo in a net.

Speaker 9 That's what I do. Okay.
Yeah, my main job is poop collection.

Speaker 7 And the reason why is because, as she'll tell you, poop is a gold mine.

Speaker 10 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 Apparently, you can learn a lot about whales by looking at their poop.

Speaker 9 Everything you can imagine, anything that you can get from a blood sample, you can analyze through the feces.

Speaker 2 Hormones, microbes, environmental chemicals. Yes.

Speaker 2 So what they do is they go out in the boat until they spot this group of killer whales, and then

Speaker 7 you do what's called a distant poop follow oh and i believe that that is a scientific term

Speaker 2 you form a little polite distance back yeah everyone needs some privacy exactly don't want to overcrowd them and at some point

Speaker 7 one of giles's assistants a non-human research assistant oh iber the dog the former street dog from sacramento will pick up a scent

Speaker 9 she'll go to the front of the boat put her snout in the air stand up on the bow and then leads them to it

Speaker 6 Does the whale poop float at the surface?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 7 We're not talking a solid turd by any means.

Speaker 2 It's more of a thick pancake batter.

Speaker 2 And then they just lean over the side of the boat with this plastic lab vial on the end of a stick.

Speaker 9 And gently break the surface of the water.

Speaker 2 And scoop up the poop. Okay.
So the reason Lucy went to visit Giles and these whales is because the scientists who study them had noticed something odd.

Speaker 9 There comes a time when we don't see the females in this population giving birth.

Speaker 2 When they got to be around like 40 or so, the female whales just stopped having babies, even though they lived to be 70, 80, even like 100 years old.

Speaker 9 So these females were living this long stretch of their life without having any new calves.

Speaker 2 At first, the scientists thought they were having miscarriages maybe, or there was some kind of pollutant in the water or something that was causing these older females to stop having babies.

Speaker 2 But in 2017, Giles and this colleague of hers, Sam Wasser, published a poop analysis that confirmed a very different hypothesis that people had been considering for a couple decades.

Speaker 2 They wrote, and I quote here, the females in the population have undergone reproductive senescence.

Speaker 6 Oh, senescence.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which was like not a word I knew, but I'm

Speaker 2 but maybe you know it. I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's like a fancy way of saying that at a certain age, the reproductive system of these whales started to physiologically shut down.

Speaker 2 And along with a lot of other observations about the whales and autopsies of beach whales, they were able to like confirm that these whales were

Speaker 2 going through menopause.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 That's my big reveal, Bolly.

Speaker 6 I guess I maybe would have expected them to go through menopause.

Speaker 2 You're not surprised. You're not surprised.
I don't know. I'm like, well, you kind of should be surprised because

Speaker 2 actually, up until they figured this out about the whales, scientists widely believed that menopause was a uniquely human thing. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 7 It was assumed that human females were the only species that went through it.

Speaker 2 Out of like 6,000 some species of mammals, they thought we were the only ones.

Speaker 6 So we were just, yeah, we were just freaks.

Speaker 2 And freaks, because if you think about it scientifically, menopause is actually very weird.

Speaker 6 You're just, isn't, is it, is this sort of you saying like this is weird or do you think scientists are like, yo, this is weird?

Speaker 2 I mean, they would probably say it a little bit more fancy.

Speaker 11 So I'm, you know, I would just come.

Speaker 11 Well, no, like, it is super weird, right? It is super weird.

Speaker 2 Okay, so this is a scientist. His name is Kevin.

Speaker 11 And I have a long last name. Langergraver.
Kevin Langergraver. I'm an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

Speaker 2 And Kevin says, from an evolutionary point of view, no animal should have what he calls the substantial post-reproductive lifespan.

Speaker 6 Substantial post-reproductive lifespan.

Speaker 2 Fun phrase. Yeah.
I asked him if we could say something more fun, and he said no. No.

Speaker 2 Anyway, the point is, it's the living for a long time after you can no longer reproduce. That's the weird part.

Speaker 11 It shouldn't be, because from the perspective of evolution, right?

Speaker 11 Evolution favors traits that get more genes into the next generation.

Speaker 2 And if you're not having babies, babies, you're not sending your genes into the next generation.

Speaker 7 Natural selection takes a pretty dim view of a loss of fertility, and once you stop breeding, you die.

Speaker 2 That's the general story.

Speaker 6 And is natural selection really that cut and dry that it's if you're not contributing to the genetic pool, you should be out?

Speaker 11 Well, of course, natural selection isn't everything, right? Not every trait you look at in an organism has a functional reason.

Speaker 11 But, you know, like the vast majority of mammal species, you end up reproducing until you die, then it's still super weird that a few don't.

Speaker 2 Like, think about it this way. If there were a human woman who could keep having babies for her whole life until she dies, she would genetically at least out-compete the women who can't.

Speaker 2 So it sort of seems like there should be some evolutionary genetic reason for the reproductive system to kind of peter out before the human person does.

Speaker 11 That is the evolutionary puzzle, right?

Speaker 2 So it's not. Now, one of the most common things people say when they hear about this is that in humans, this is kind of like a fluke of modern life.

Speaker 7 So the idea

Speaker 7 was that perhaps human females were living beyond their reproductive shelf life because we were being propped up by regular meals and modern medicine.

Speaker 6 So the idea being that in olden times, we used to die around menopause. And so this long post-reproductive life is just because now we live longer than we used to.

Speaker 2 Right. But it turns out, actually, that's not the case.
Which part?

Speaker 2 Which part

Speaker 2 is not

Speaker 2 true? None of that's true. Okay.
In ancient times, people also lived to be about 70. Really?

Speaker 6 Yeah. I just thought it was like the only people who did were like royals who were highly attended.

Speaker 2 So there's this interesting thing where like we get these average life expectancy numbers

Speaker 2 and the averages take into account the fact that that people die before like the age of five because they die in childbirth they die of infant diseases oh it's like a skewed average yeah exactly so if you account for that you see that many women were in fact living 20 25 years 30 years after they could no longer reproduce so humans have been going through menopause like for the entire history of humans and It's a thing, menopause.

Speaker 7 It's a roller coaster, you know, it's an emotional and physical roller coaster.

Speaker 2 And back to Lucy, she says that going into menopause for her was pretty brutal.

Speaker 7 I mean, hot sweats and furious moods.

Speaker 2 And it's pretty brutal for a lot of women. But she also says...

Speaker 7 Once it, it's, I was going to say it's icy fingers, but it's anything but icy.

Speaker 2 Once it's hot fingers got a hold of me. She did have in the back of her mind this question, which was, why?

Speaker 7 Why was I still alive?

Speaker 8 That's a question.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a pretty intense way to put it. But the thing about menopause.

Speaker 7 You know, I mean, it's, I mean, I know it gets a lot of press now and everybody's allowed to talk about it. My mother's generation, no one did.

Speaker 2 For such a long time, it's been completely ignored by science, by culture.

Speaker 2 And probably partly because of that, I do think a lot of women end up feeling invisible or useless.

Speaker 7 You know, you were just sort of irrelevant after going after your period stopped, you know, and you were kind of this sort of, you know, kind of gray puddle of purposelessness, you know.

Speaker 2 God. So, Lucy.
So when I heard

Speaker 2 that killer whales went through menopause, it felt like a chance to ask, what is this time in her life for in a kind of different, more scientific way?

Speaker 12 Yeah, so these are really big questions, and there are a number of.

Speaker 2 So, this is a scientist named Darren Croft.

Speaker 12 I am professor of animal behavior at the University of Exeter.

Speaker 2 He's part of this huge team that's been studying these killer whales for like decades now.

Speaker 7 And so, there's this incredible, rich amount of data on their behavior and and their movements.

Speaker 2 And so what the scientists watching these whales day in, day out have seen is that there's a lot of purpose.

Speaker 9 And we know that now. These females have rich social lives.

Speaker 2 Lives that could make sense in like a cold, hard, evolutionary logic kind of way.

Speaker 2 So for example, Giles and Darren told us about this one particular female killer whale named Granny, who's possibly the most famous wild killer whale in the world.

Speaker 9 Granny, she was just an astonishing whale who lived to be at least into her late 80s, possibly as old as 105.

Speaker 2 And according to Darren and Giles, all the way up to the end.

Speaker 9 She had this zest for life.

Speaker 2 Yeah, what does that look like?

Speaker 9 Socializing, foraging, breaching, tail slapping.

Speaker 2 It does sound zesty. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just living life. Yeah.
And in particular, the scientists noticed she's actually a killer grandma.

Speaker 9 Carried and played with and babysat, brand new babies.

Speaker 2 Because the way these groups of killer whales usually work is...

Speaker 12 Sons and daughters stay in their mom's household.

Speaker 2 So Granny's part of this sort of multi-generational pod.

Speaker 9 Yes, our colleagues capture drone imagery of Granny helping to corral a fish towards her great-grandcalf.

Speaker 2 When Darren and his colleagues did a study of these killer whales, they found that the whales that had post-menopausal grandmas around, like Granny, whales who aren't having babies of their own anymore.

Speaker 6 Right. Okay.

Speaker 2 When those ones were still around, the young had higher chances of survival than the whales who had no grandmas or even had grandmas who were premenopausal.

Speaker 6 Does that make sense? So the grandmas who couldn't have babies anymore were more helpful than the grandmas who were still having babies. Right.

Speaker 2 And this actually gave like a lot of support to an idea that people have been thinking about in terms of humans actually for a while.

Speaker 7 The grandmother hypothesis.

Speaker 6 I feel like I hear a lot about the grandmother hypothesis, but I'm not even sure I know how it works.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. But it's basically what we just learned with the whales.

Speaker 12 The hypothesis there is what's important is that post-reproductive females play an important role in the survival of their grandoffspring.

Speaker 2 There's something that makes a lot of sense, I'll just say as a person with a two-year-old child, like makes a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, like my mother is just like incredibly helpful and useful. I mean, that's data point of one.
It's not scientific, but we feel how this is like makes some amount of sense to be true.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 6 So this hypothesis is just like your evolutionary purpose is to be a mom, even if you are no longer being a mom.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the cultural takeaway. That's like what most of us think of, if you've ever heard of this before.

Speaker 2 But when you look at the whales, it goes way beyond that. Like the older killer whale female, she's actually kind of running the show.

Speaker 9 I mean, it was clear that Granny was the one in charge.

Speaker 9 The matriarch of all matriarchs.

Speaker 2 They play diplomat or keeper of the peace, especially with the younger male whales.

Speaker 9 Females, especially post-reproductive females, are intervening in the lives of their adult sons, making sure that they're not roughhousing enough to get injured.

Speaker 7 But also, they're like hunter-in-chief, leading the pod to find food to feed everybody.

Speaker 2 Granny and her family have basically always exclusively eaten salmon.

Speaker 7 But those salmon are really hard to find now because they've been hunted by humans.

Speaker 2 But Granny, with her 11-pound, super intelligent brain, she can remember things from like 25 years ago.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you know, 25 years ago at this time of year, there was a bunch of salmon that did go up this random little tributary halfway up the coast.

Speaker 2 And the scientists could like literally see this play out as they were watching the whales on these hunts.

Speaker 9 Granny would just start slapping her tail on the water and like all the whales would go like, whoop, granny's calling. We're going to go in the direction that she wants us all to go.

Speaker 9 That was something that we used to get to see quite often.

Speaker 9 And even after she spent 45 minutes or even an hour trying to catch a fish, you know, continuing, even though she was most assuredly hungry herself, Charles said she would see her bite the fish in half or sometimes even in thirds and have family members come over to grab that fish.

Speaker 2 So the postmenopausal female whales, they might not be adding more of their genes to the gene pool.

Speaker 7 But they're not sitting around filing their nails and watching daytime soap operas.

Speaker 2 They're like totally crucial to the survival of the group.

Speaker 7 These orca females are the repositories for ecological wisdom. They're keeping their hunting community alive.

Speaker 13 Does it make you think about your experience as a woman? I mean, whenever I ask scientists this question, they're like, don't ask this question.

Speaker 13 But I guess, did like looking the orca in the eye and thinking about Granny change anything for you?

Speaker 7 Do you know, I probably shouldn't answer this question,

Speaker 2 but I will.

Speaker 7 I'll give you an honest answer because I did. I felt incredibly moved by them.
I really did. I felt very, I was really pleased that I made the effort and I went there and I spent time with Dr.
Giles.

Speaker 7 And, you know, understanding how evolution had

Speaker 7 granted these females these long lives

Speaker 7 with such purpose, made me think

Speaker 7 differently about

Speaker 7 my loss of fertility. And

Speaker 7 I found the idea that

Speaker 7 my value now was in my wisdom and my brain, and the things that I can teach other people

Speaker 7 really empowering.

Speaker 7 As opposed to feeling like you're a grey puddle that's, you know, decreasing relevance in the world. And, you know,

Speaker 7 it's the kind of, it's, it's the opposite. You know, in every way, I was like, be more orca.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Plus the fact that the older females are having tons of sex.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 2 I mean, that sounds great. Right.

Speaker 6 I love the idea of like being an orca, but there is something in me that like just sort of fundamentally chafes at the idea that I have to be useful in some way, like whether that's like being a caretaker or being like hunter-in-chief.

Speaker 6 Right. Like, it's like I always have to prove my worth

Speaker 6 if I'm not there to have babies.

Speaker 2 I think you'll be kind of happy to hear that,

Speaker 2 you know, that's not the only idea that science has about menopause. When we come back from break, I'm going to tell you about another animal that's, I don't know, I think you might like this one.

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Speaker 8 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 8 All they have left is a life raft and each other. This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan.

Speaker 8 Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House. Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.

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Speaker 6 All right, we're back for the second part of this episode. Yep.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's recap. Love a recap.
We're talking about menopause and how it's super weird.

Speaker 6 Totally weird.

Speaker 2 We thought for a long time we're the only ones who did it, and then scientists learned about orcas. Right.

Speaker 2 And scientists started watching them, and they sort of thought, oh, maybe we're solving this evolutionary puzzle of like why we have menopause, of why we had menopause, but maybe not so much.

Speaker 11 So let me unpack that.

Speaker 2 So again, this is this guy, Kevin Langergraber.

Speaker 11 We're really getting into the weeds here.

Speaker 2 One important detail that I didn't mention before about Kevin is that every year for the past 25 years, Kevin has spent time living what he calls chimp life.

Speaker 2 Working on this thing called the Ngogo chimpanzee project.

Speaker 11 Which is a long-term study of this one community of chimpanzees.

Speaker 2 It's in southwestern Uganda.

Speaker 11 Pretty much smack dab in the middle of Kibali National Park.

Speaker 2 So picture like huge, huge trees. And a wide open forest floor.

Speaker 11 Like an open park.

Speaker 2 Where every single day...

Speaker 11 Get up in the morning, have your breakfast and your coffee. The sun is just starting to come up.
That's when you want to leave and go find the chimps.

Speaker 2 And then he spends the rest of his day just watching them.

Speaker 11 Basically, you're writing down what they do.

Speaker 2 They're grooming, they're hunting, they're eating.

Speaker 2 So, kind of right from the beginning of his time there, Kevin started to notice something interesting about the older female chimps.

Speaker 11 Okay. Like Garbo, for example.

Speaker 6 She's an old-timey silent movie character.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 11 This female who now is about 72 years old.

Speaker 2 No way.

Speaker 2 72?

Speaker 9 That's like my mom's age. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Kevin's actually known Garbo from the very beginning, since she was about 50. Okay.
At which point she already had adult kids. But for the last 25 years, he's never seen her have a baby.

Speaker 11 But here's the thing: you know, post-reproductive individuals, they exist, you know, there's always like the occasional old female who doesn't reproduce anymore.

Speaker 2 But the thing Kevin wanted to figure out was: is garbo an anomaly? Or is this something that's happening to more chimps than just her? Exactly.

Speaker 2 And to get to the bottom of that, he had to collect biological samples.

Speaker 6 Okay, back to poop.

Speaker 2 No, not poop.

Speaker 2 Pee. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Urine.

Speaker 7 Urine, urine. No shade to poop samples, obviously.

Speaker 11 Urine collection is actually easier than fecal sample collection because they pee a lot more than they poo.

Speaker 2 I don't know about easy, though, because what Kevin has to do is

Speaker 11 you get a stick from the forest. Picture a stick that's about three feet long and it looks kind of like a Y.
Sort of like a weird pitchfork or something.

Speaker 2 And he puts a little plastic bag on the end of the Y.

Speaker 11 And then when the chimps are up in a tree, they're peeing down on you, and you stick your stick out, you know, away from you so that you don't collect too much pee yourself,

Speaker 11 you know, on your head and stuff.

Speaker 2 And you get the stream of pea to connect with your stick.

Speaker 11 And then it fills up that

Speaker 11 bag.

Speaker 11 This is highbrow science.

Speaker 2 Now, these pea samples, they're sort of like the whale poop. They can tell you a lot about what's happening in the bodies of individual chimps, like Garbo, for example.

Speaker 11 You're just waiting for Garbo to pee. And then when she does, you'd better be ready.

Speaker 2 So when Kevin analyzed her samples and the samples of the other older female chimps, we found, you know, smoking gun sort of level of science that we rarely get.

Speaker 2 Because looking at the levels of reproductive hormones, it was really just easy to tell that female chimps

Speaker 2 go through menopause. Yes.

Speaker 2 And I mean, like, they go through menopause. It's very similar to the human experience.

Speaker 7 Or at least we think it is.

Speaker 2 Kevin was very careful to mention that, like, I can't speak to hot flashes.

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 6 Like, I can't speak to some of the physical symptoms or like the emotional swings.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 6 But, like, there's a hormone cessation.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right. And that cessation, it's pretty similar to the pattern in humans.
It's like a ramping down, basically. Wow.

Speaker 2 And after that, they just keep on living their lives for decades sometimes. Just like humans and just like the whales.

Speaker 6 And then there were three.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Well, sort of.

Speaker 2 Actually, when they did all that orca research, they actually found out that there were a handful of other whales that are really similar to orcas that also go through menopause. So like narwhals.

Speaker 2 Narwhals. Yeah.
But chimps are the third major animal group we know of that experience this long life after menopause.

Speaker 6 It's is Garbo also scratching her head, asking what life is for after menopause?

Speaker 11 No, she's not.

Speaker 2 But Kevin definitely is.

Speaker 2 Let's think about it. Okay, so I'm going to like paint you a picture of what Garbo's life is like.

Speaker 2 Okay, so before she stopped having babies, she had three sons.

Speaker 11 Monk, Richmond, and Hutcherson.

Speaker 2 By the way, why don't they name them like Steve or something? It feels very like old money. I know, like, who came up with it.

Speaker 2 Okay, so Monk and Richmond actually aren't alive anymore, but let's just like imagine a time when they all were alive.

Speaker 2 Because like, long story short, a big part of Garbo's day is hanging out with her sons she had like you know a good relationship with with both hutcherson and richman

Speaker 2 what about monk no no monk she hated monk oh like they didn't even know they were related until they did the genetic testing and they were like oh i guess she had three sons not just two scandal yeah dang garbo dang garbo

Speaker 2 anyway so all day garbo hutcherson and richman would be together richman and hutcherson would groom garbo a lot like kind of running their fingers through her hair and picking out bugs and like scratching her little back.

Speaker 2 Love it. And she would totally bliss out.

Speaker 11 Like zone out in this really zen-like stage. It's like, you know, I'm bald now, but I remember when I used to go to the hairdresser and get my hair cut.

Speaker 11 And you could feel like the hairdresser running their hands through your scalp. I would just zone out.

Speaker 2 Also, Richmond and Hutcherson would bring food to Garbo. You know, share meat with Garbo.
Monkey meat. Chimps eat monkey meats? Yeah.
It's a chimp delicacy. They love a monkey meat.
Okay.

Speaker 2 In the movie version of this, they would bring it to her on like a silver platter and honor her.

Speaker 6 I mean, that's what's happening in my head.

Speaker 6 So that does that mean she doesn't have to hunt for herself?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 11 Also, if someone would be aggressive to Garbo, often, you know, Richmond and Hutcherson would like chase them off, you know, protecting their mother.

Speaker 2 And that's it.

Speaker 2 That's all that Garbo does. So like, kind of notice here what you're not hearing.

Speaker 11 No real grandmothering behavior.

Speaker 2 So Garbo is not making Christmas cookies for her grandchildren.

Speaker 11 No, she's not.

Speaker 6 She's not doing anything toward the youth.

Speaker 2 Or really towards anyone. Oh, really? Okay.
She's not super helpful. Huh.
God, that's the dream.

Speaker 6 I want to be an old lady chimp.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 11 And so because the grandmother hypothesis doesn't seem to apply to chimps.

Speaker 2 Kevin and a bunch of the other scientists started looking into like, what is going on here?

Speaker 11 Yeah, the second most prominent hypothesis is called this reproductive conflict hypothesis.

Speaker 2 The reproductive conflict hypothesis. I love that we've gone from like the grandmother hypothesis, which feels so loving, to reproductive conflict.
Reproductive conflict.

Speaker 2 Well, bear with me because in some ways it's maybe the opposite or it's maybe not quite what you think it's going to be. I love that.

Speaker 2 Go. Okay.
And the theory itself is like a little bit convoluted, but the big idea is that there's a sort of subtle evolutionary calculation hidden in the way chimpanzee females set up their families.

Speaker 11 In chimpanzees, males stay in their group for their whole lives.

Speaker 2 But the females, the daughters, when they hit puberty, they leave their family group to join another one.

Speaker 11 The general reason for this is like avoid inbreeding, right?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 11 So think of this. Think of it.
You're a female chimp. You're born in one group.

Speaker 2 Then you hit like 12 or 13.

Speaker 11 You've disperse to a new group where you want to start having kids.

Speaker 2 When you first get into that new family, you're not related to anybody around you. You don't share genes with anyone.

Speaker 11 But as you have your first kid, let's say you have a male.

Speaker 2 Then you have one family member, your son, who does have your genes.

Speaker 11 It eventually grows up. It has its own kids.

Speaker 2 Those kids have your genes.

Speaker 11 So you're just getting more related to group members.

Speaker 2 As you grow into an older female chimp. Okay.

Speaker 2 So now to zoom out a little bit.

Speaker 11 Now here's the, why is it called the reproductive conflict hypothesis?

Speaker 2 If you look at the larger group that the chimp female is part of, there's a limited amount of resources.

Speaker 11 And if you have a kid, that means that some other female in your group can't have a kid.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's just how basic ecology works.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 11 Reproduction is a zero-sum game. So there's reproductive conflict between females.

Speaker 2 And so if you're this older female chimp and you're looking around, maybe there are like new young females that have just joined your family.

Speaker 11 And you're like, who's going to have the next kid, me or this young female?

Speaker 11 If this young female has this kid, who's she going to have it with? Well, it could be my son that has the kid with this young female, right?

Speaker 2 And my genes could get passed passed down that way.

Speaker 11 So I'm going to get some indirect fitness benefits through this young female's reproduction.

Speaker 2 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
On the other hand.

Speaker 11 Can the young female say the same thing about the reproduction of this old female? No. She shares no genes with the hypothetical offspring of this old female.

Speaker 11 So as the evolutionary math would have it, old females are predicted to sort of seed these reproductive opportunities to the young females and stop reproducing.

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 6 So it's like Garbo and other older female chimps can contribute to the group and get a benefit themselves just by bowing out and doing their own thing.

Speaker 2 Right. That's cool.
Yeah, that makes sense, right? Good theory. Good theory.

Speaker 11 But just like the grandmother hypothesis, it's not a perfect fit.

Speaker 2 Why, why, why?

Speaker 2 Well, apparently, so this gets kind of like mathy and nitpicky, but Kevin says that the benefits of these older females bowing out, they like don't quite make up for the fact that they're like living these long, luxurious post-reproductive lives like painting their nails and eating monkey meat.

Speaker 2 So it like maybe it doesn't quite work. Okay.
Damn it.

Speaker 6 So is Kevin about to swoop in and be like, I've got my own hypothesis.

Speaker 2 No, I do not. Oh, what?

Speaker 2 I do not.

Speaker 6 Wait, so I'm just left hanging?

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 11 And left with the, I don't know, just the...

Speaker 11 The magic and wonder of this world, right?

Speaker 2 There's like not a grand universal theory of post-reproductive females. Okay.
And it's still just like a real open question of why we orcas or chimps live this long post-reproductive life.

Speaker 6 Right. I mean, honestly, there's a part of me that's like, thank God.
Because if we had actually found an answer, it would have felt so prescriptive.

Speaker 2 I don't know. It makes me feel like it would have been kind of sad.
I totally, like, I agree. I mean, I think it would be kind of limiting.

Speaker 2 And I think the thing is, one of the things I've loved about this reporting process of the story isn't really learning the theories, which are kind of confusing in a lot of ways, but actually learning about these specific animals like Granny and Garbo and just imagining their lives.

Speaker 2 Like, what do they do during that time? Yeah. And I feel like I've gotten to a point in my reporting where I'm much more interested in the what they're doing than the why does this happen.

Speaker 2 If that makes any sense. And at some point, I also remembered that there is, of course, that third animal that goes through menopause and has a long post-reproductive life.

Speaker 2 Everyone feels good, strong. Yes.
And so I called up one of them. Yes.

Speaker 10 My name is Caroline Paul, and I'm a writer. And my expertise is that I am post-menopausal.

Speaker 10 I'm 61 years old.

Speaker 2 I mean, to be fair, Caroline also wrote an entire book that's basically a study of how women live their lives after menopause.

Speaker 10 Called Tough Broad, From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking, How Outdoor Adventure improves our lives as we age.

Speaker 2 And so I went to her and I asked her, like, okay, there's Granny, there's Garbo. Now tell me about Caroline.
I love that.

Speaker 10 You know, I think when I was young, I was really interested in metrics. So I wanted to be the first.

Speaker 2 She's specifically this like very adventure-y kind of lady.

Speaker 10 Sometimes I was the first down a river. I was the first to mountain bike through the Bolivian Andes.

Speaker 2 I'm like, Heather just got her driver's license. Yeah, I didn't just get it, but I am learning how to drive alone on the road.

Speaker 2 So, you know, everyone's in a different moment of their life each their own adventure anyway back to caroline when she started to have menopause symptoms or really perimenopause symptoms it was almost like someone had like killed your dog and given you a weird acid drug at the same time for extended periods.

Speaker 2 Like in what sense is that the case?

Speaker 10 I was crying all the time and eating at weird hours of the night. The other thing that kept happening is that I would go to parties and I wouldn't remember anybody's face.

Speaker 2 Whoa. And all of this went on for like, I think it was like four and a half years.

Speaker 8 Jeez.

Speaker 2 But this all kind of tracked with what she was expecting to happen because she, like kind of all of us, had heard that this time in her life would be pretty brutal. Right.

Speaker 6 The only thing you hear, it feels like, is how dreadful it will be.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 10 But I just remember around 57, suddenly realizing that I felt really different.

Speaker 2 She felt like a lot calmer and clearer.

Speaker 10 There was no more sudden crying jags. I remembered everybody's name, everybody's face.
And that's when she realized, oh, now I'm in menopause.

Speaker 2 And for this part of her life, she told me really the only messaging she was getting is what, like, not to do.

Speaker 10 Narrowing life, not opening it up. Because women, as they get older, are getting told things like, We have to watch our bones, we have to watch our brain, our cognitive health is on decline.

Speaker 10 We're told that as we age, we're losing things.

Speaker 2 But beyond that, she kind of didn't have a roadmap.

Speaker 10 For menopausal women, women over 50, 60, we don't have a script script anymore. There's a big gray area.

Speaker 2 She felt kind of lost. Meanwhile, men her age, everywhere they look, they have tons of scripts, tons of icons.

Speaker 10 I mean, Harrison Ford is still running through tombs. Tom Cruise is jumping off some high building somewhere.

Speaker 2 And she was like, why can't we have that?

Speaker 10 So she set out to write this book, which became the quest to understand whether I should have outdoor adventure in my life.

Speaker 2 And she met all these different women in their 60s and 70s and 80s that were doing like totally badass stuff.

Speaker 10 From base jumping as a grandmother to sea kayaking to BMX bike racing.

Speaker 2 These are not women who are worried about bones breaking. Not at all.
And like, well, that's great. And I'm all for it.

Speaker 2 But, you know, as somebody who's maybe not the most physically adventurous person, I also really appreciated some of the other stories she told me about women who are going on quieter, but still very meaningful adventures.

Speaker 10 I went bird watching with someone in a wheelchair.

Speaker 2 And she talked to this kind of amazing woman who learned how to swim in her 60s. Oh, cool.
And it was very scary for her, but she still pushed herself to do it.

Speaker 2 So what she found was like not just a bunch of role models for her, but she also found that for a lot of these women, instead of closing down their life,

Speaker 10 had found new aspects of themselves.

Speaker 2 Finding new possibilities for their life. And they kind of had these new capacities for awe and wonder and bravery that they had never never tapped into before.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a time of great exploration that we should be grabbing hold of. There are new permutations and very valuable ones of us as we age.

Speaker 6 It's like the minute hypothesis is just to flip the script or something, that no script is the script.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right, exactly.

Speaker 10 And I wonder if one of the sort of uses of us, if we're going to be that, that, let's say, scientific about it, is simply to show the younger generation that life is going to get better.

Speaker 10 I have seen personally that when young people see how our lives are at this age, I think all that is of great value.

Speaker 10 So we don't really have to put a lot of work into that. We can just go and be our best selves.

Speaker 10 We should be sitting in that tree, being fed delectable meats, and doing whatever we want.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Heather. You too, Molly.
Good luck on your

Speaker 8 driving journey?

Speaker 6 Not on the driving journey, the menopause journey.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, right. Our menopause journey.
You've got some time. Hopefully.
Yeah, maybe

Speaker 6 we'll be holding hands and bass jumping together.

Speaker 2 I don't think so. Maybe we'll do it.
Let's go bird watching. Okay.

Speaker 6 Heather might not have jumped out of planes, but she has done plenty of stories for us over the years. And one of them is a very delightful conversation with Lulu and Latif called Butt Stuff.

Speaker 6 And it is based on Heather's book called Butts: a Backstory. By the way, Lucy Cook's latest book has a bunch of other stories about the lives of females of many, many different species.

Speaker 6 It is well worth checking out. It is called Bitch.
And when you're done with that, you can just move on over to Tough Broad by Caroline Paul.

Speaker 6 It is a book about the outdoors and aging and how those things go together.

Speaker 6 Special thanks to Daniel Friedman, Rachel Gross, Sam Wasser, Sam Ellis, and Kate Radke. This episode was reported by Heather Radke with help from Becca Bressler.

Speaker 2 It was produced by Sara Cari and Becca Bressler.

Speaker 6 It was also edited by Becca Bressler and fact-checked by Emily Krieger.

Speaker 6 I now have to do something on these credits that I don't really want to do, which is actually say goodbye to the Becca Brestler, who you just heard a ton about.

Speaker 6 This is Becca's last episode at Radiolab. You may remember her for her on-air hits about voter profiling and the economics of food delivery systems and that one thing about

Speaker 2 the bug bite tool and whether or not it works.

Speaker 6 On the inside of the show, we know her for all of that and also her just like crazy fast editing style, like her strategy brain, her sharp, sharp, sharp sense of humor, and also her ability to sing Billy Joel

Speaker 6 at a level that is unbelievable. And I hope you all get to hear at some point.
Becca, we love you. We will miss you.
It's been a really rad eight years. I can't believe it's been eight years.

Speaker 6 And yeah, I can't wait to see what you do next. All of us can't wait.
We'll miss you.

Speaker 6 Bye.

Speaker 11 Hi, I'm David and I'm in McMurdo Station Antarctica.

Speaker 14 Here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abamrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.
Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design.

Speaker 14 Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Beka Bresler, W.

Speaker 14 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Uria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nanan Sambandam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sambak, Anissa Bitsa, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young.

Speaker 14 With help from Rebecca Rand, our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 15 Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 15 Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.