Females rule
There might be a lesson here somewhere for male dominated boardrooms. It's a fact Homo sapiens is one of only a few animal species where the male is the dominant gender.
In the rest of the animal world, females rule. Killer whales or orcas have taken that to the extreme. New research shows the dominant alpha female in an orca pod is a female grandmother.
Yes, grandma orca is the top dog in the pod.
British researchers have concluded female killer whales become leaders in their pods only after menopause. They came to this determination after observing 102 killer whales in the wild as part of a nine-year of orcas summering off the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest in a study just published in Current Biology.
The researchers said the reason for the dominance of menopausal grandma orca is these older females know how to find the best places where the pod can hunt their favorite fish, which is salmon, especially when food becomes scarce.
On the average, female killer whales become mothers between the ages of 12 and 40, said Lauren Brent, an associate research fellow in animal behavior at the University of Exeter. But females can live over 90 years as compared to males that rarely survive past 50.
Brent said the pod values older females for their accumulated knowledge and wisdom, said a story by NBC News. Among orcas and in other whales, the oldest members have learned many of the places salmon converge in. Observations of whales by Brent and her colleagues confirm this observation.
Menopausal killer whales use their experience to help their families find food in times of hardship, said senior author Darren Croft, a University of Exeter behavioral ecologist to the website, Science.
"This is the first study to show that these post-reproductive females play a key role in their society by storing ecological knowledge," said Croft. "With killer whales we're still looking at a species where information is stored in individuals -- it's not stored in the Internet or books," he says.
He said the whales may give us some insight into what forces may have shaped our own evolutionary history.
