Degenerative Aging as a Side Effect of the Colonization of Land

Today's open access paper makes for an interesting companion piece to the recently proposed adaptive-hitchhike model for the evolution of longevity. Here also, the length of species life spans and the degree to which age-related degeneration (senescence) takes place over time is suggested to be a side-effect of adaptations to specific ecological niches. The authors of this paper observe that a greater proportion of marine clades have a long life span and lesser degrees of senescence than is the case for land-dwelling clades. Further, a greater fraction of marine species continually grow throughout life, a capability that has implications for the processes of regeneration and tissue maintenance. In addition, species that evolved a return to marine life, such as aquatic mammals, tend to be longer lived than their near relative species that remained land-dwelling. The paper provides a great deal of data and sorting of that data, but is light on detailed conclusions. It is interesting to see the clear advantage in life span enjoyed, on average, by marine species. It is already the case that many in the research community look at the existence of multiple unusually long-lived species in specific niches, such as naked mole-rats and near relative species in their oxygen-poor underground environment, and hypothesize that longevity arises as a side-effect of the evolutionary adaptations required to thrive in that environment. The work here provides much more food for thought on...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs