Croft’s team discovered that if a male orca’s mother died before his thirtieth birthday, he was three times more likely to die the next year. If she passed away after he turned thirty, he was eight times more likely to snuff it during the following year. But if mum had gone through menopause, his odds of dying the next year went up by fourteen times. The data was irrefutable: sons whose mothers live a long time after giving birth to them have a survival advantage over those whose mothers die earlier, and that only becomes more true as both mother and son age. These post-menopausal orcas thus
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