麻豆淫院

Is aging inevitable? While most living beings age, some do so more slowly than others. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science addresses a fascinating question: what if migration influences the way we age?

To explore this mystery, scientists turned their attention to the pink flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus), a graceful migratory bird that is emblematic of the Camargue region of France.

Birds do not all age in the same way. Thanks to a flamingo tagging and tracking program conducted for over 40 years by the Tour du Valat research institute, scientists have discovered a surprising phenomenon: migratory flamingos age more slowly than resident flamingos.

In this species, some birds remain in the Camargue for their entire lives (they are called "residents"), while others travel every year along the shores of the Mediterranean (these are the "migrants"). At the beginning of their adult life, resident flamingos fare better: well-established in the lagoons of the French Mediterranean coast during the winter, they survive and reproduce more than migrants. But at what cost?

As they age, residents decline more rapidly. With 40% greater aging, their ability to reproduce decreases and the risk of death increases faster than among migratory flamingos.

On the contrary, migratory flamingos, those that leave to spend the winter in Italy, Spain or North Africa, pay a high price for these seasonal journeys early in life (higher mortality and lower reproduction rates) but seem to compensate for this by slower aging at an advanced age. Thus, the onset of the aging process occurs earlier in residents (20.4 years on average) than in migrants (21.9 years).

Migration: An animal behavior that influences aging

This study shows that seasonal migration鈥攁 behavior exhibited by billions of animals鈥攃an influence the rate of aging. In flamingos, deciding not to migrate offers advantages early in life that are associated with accelerated senescence at an advanced age.

"This is probably linked to a compromise between performance when young and health in old age," explains S茅bastien Roques, researcher at the CNRS and co-author of the study.

"Residents live intensely at first, but pay for this pace later on. Migrants, on the other hand, seem to age more slowly." With their long lifespan (some live to be over 50 years old!) and behavioral diversity, flamingos are more than just an iconic animal of the Camargue. They also provide an ideal model for understanding aging in animals.

"That's the whole point of having continued this study over the long term. Initiated in 1977 in the Camargue by tagging flamingos with rings that can be read from a distance with a telescope, this program still allows us to observe flamingos tagged that year," explain Arnaud B茅chet and Jocelyn Champagnon, research directors at the Tour du Valat and co-authors of the study.

"This is a unique dataset that is proving invaluable for understanding the mechanisms of aging in animal populations."

Unraveling the secrets of aging, a scientific and existential quest

This discovery is part of an exciting field of research: senescence, or biological aging. Hugo Cayuela, one of the study's co-authors and a researcher at the University of Oxford, comments, "Understanding the causes of changes in the rate of aging is a problem that has obsessed researchers and polymath philosophers since ancient times."

He continues, "For a long time, we thought that these variations occurred mainly between species. But recently, our perception of the problem has changed. We are accumulating evidence showing that, within the same species, individuals often do not age at the same rate due to genetic, behavioral and environmental variations."

By studying how certain animals are born, reproduce and die, scientists hope to unlock the secrets of aging... In doing so, they are attempting to answer one of the most existential and central questions in biology: why and how do we die?