All animals age. There are those who do it within a few hours, those who use decades or centuries before showing signs of decline, the fact is that the hard law of the passage of time does not escape. It is one of the reasons why the study of aging and its mechanisms remains a very popular research vein: who would not want to discover the secrets to slow down the passing of the years?
The new research published on Pnas It reveals a quite unexpected one: at least among the flamingos, the specimens that make migrations age more slowly than those who remain sedentary.
Migratory and residents. The study, a collaboration between different universities and the Tour Du Vlat research institute in Camargue, focused precisely on the populations of flamingos of that region of France, which of these birds made a pride (and a very powerful tourist lever).
The Camargue flamingos are not all the same but are divided into two categories: residents and migrants. The former, as the name suggests, pass all of their life in the same place, while the latter travel to the Mediterranean and go to winter in Italy, Spain or North Africa.
The team that studied the flamingos was able to exploit a huge amount of data: the program for the marking and monitoring of these birds has been active for almost 40 years. The analysis of this “treasure” revealed a surprising detail:
The resident flamingos age before the migratory ones, starting to show the first signs of decline on average after 20 years, against 22 of those who move every year.
Better an easy life … or stay young? The differences between the two populations of flamingos do not end there. Migratory somehow seem to have to pay their slower aging:
They have lower reproductive rates and above all a higher youth mortality than residents. In other words, the flamingos that never change home enjoy life at the beginning but they age even before. At the contrary, migratory suffers more in the early years but in return they remain young for longer.
It is therefore a compromise for flamingos: accepting a dangerous life in exchange for a more late aging (which also means being able to reproduce longer), or focus on comforts from the beginning, knowing that they will make you grow older soon.
However, the results show that aging does not appear as a specific mechanism: within the same species, different variations are recorded, due in part to genetic factors and in part to environmental behaviors and conditions. Therefore, aging is more complicated than we thought.
