Aging of King penguins
Aging rate, immunosenescence and genome stability: What can we learn from king penguins? This is the question being explored in a research collaboration between the University of Helsinki, Zoo Zurich and the French Polar Institute.
Change in lifestyle
Prehistoric humans often had to cope with food shortage. Agriculture and the development of medicine brought them food security and a longer life.
The same happens to animals at the zoo: they life a sheltered, low-risk, well-fed and well-cared life. As a result, they often live longer. But in animals as in humans, that longer life comes at the cost of a wide array of trade-offs, ranging from reduced fertility to cancer.
In the wild, King penguins regularly have long periods of fasting; in the zoo, they are supplied with food at all times – can parallels to humans be drawn from this? Photo: Antarctic Research Trust, Benno Lüthi
Health in old age
A collaborative effort between University of Helsinki, Zoo Zurich and the French Polar institute, among others, is now exploring how food security and a sedentary lifestyle can play a key role in determining health in old age. We focus on King penguins, a long-lived bird that is naturally adapted to fasting for weeks on end in the wild, and can live well beyond 30 years at the zoo.
Our goal is to understand what happens when this extremely active swimmer and frequent faster starts living like a typical Western human, with fresh fish within daily reach and medical care when needed. We hope that this may help us understand what happened the early phases of human transition to sedentary life. And, at the same time, that it will help us give King penguins an even better life at the zoo.
