Age Brings Knowledge

"Most behavioral research on wild animals does not mention older individuals,” notes University of Waterloo researcher Anne Innis Dagg, and indeed there is not a single reference to aging in my copy of The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior. Dagg suggests possible reasons for this omission. Behaviourists are more concerned with reproduction and evolution, she says, and do not consider that post-reproductive animals have much to tell us about either of these subjects; older animals are rarer than young animals or animals in their prime, consisting of only about 10 percent of a population; and, at least in the past, some naturalists assumed that senescence simply did not exist in the wild. “No wild animal dies of old age,” Ernest Thompson Seton wrote in Wild Animals I Have Known, the kind of dubious statement that prompted John Burroughs, in reviewing Seton’s book, to comment that Seton might better have called it “Wild Animals Only I Have...