Hibernation: The Extreme Lifestyle That Can Stop Aging
Today’s most elderly bats aren’t supposed to exist. Ounce for ounce and pound for pound, they are categorically teeny mammals; according to the evolutionary rules that hold across species, they should be short-lived, like other small-bodied creatures.
And yet, many of Earth’s winged mammals buck this trend, sometimes blowing decades past their anticipated expiration date. One species, Brandt’s bat, which weighs just four to nine grams as an adult—all the heft of a quarter—has been recorded surviving to the age of 41 in the wild, almost as long as a standard four-ton Asian elephant, and nearly 10 times as long as its body dimensions might otherwise predict. “That’s just amazingly long-lived for their size,” says Jerry Wilkinson, a biologist at the University of Maryland. “Longer than any other mammal.”
can explain the astounding longevity of bats. They are clever and collaborative, and their help them that make other animals disastrously sick—traits But one of their anti-aging tricks, among the most biologically elusive in the world, is to simply put off getting older for months out of every year.
