[RADIOLAB INTRO]

MOLLY WEBSTER: Hey. This is Radiolab. I'm Molly Webster.

HEATHER RADKE: Hi! I feel like I haven't—I haven't seen you since, like, last summer.

MOLLY: I'm sitting in for Lulu and Latif today.

MOLLY: Oh my God, since we were in Michigan?

HEATHER: Yeah.

MOLLY: With our contributing editor, Heather Radke.

HEATHER: I think that's right.

MOLLY: All right, Heather.

HEATHER: All right.

MOLLY: I'm gonna assume you have a story to tell us.

HEATHER: That's right.

MOLLY: That's why we're here.

HEATHER: [laughs] I have something to tell you.

MOLLY: Yay!

HEATHER: So a little while back, I had a conversation with one of Radiolab's favorite science writers.

LUCY COOKE: I'm Lucy Cooke. I'm the author of Bitch: On the Female of the Species, and I've got a background in zoology.

HEATHER: All right, Lucy. So ...

MOLLY: We do love Lucy.

HEATHER: Yeah. She's, like, this globetrotting tracker of amazing animal stories. She's been to Panama to meet stoned dwarf sloths. She went to Sweden to track drunken moose.

MOLLY: All right?

HEATHER: And then a little while back, while she was working on her latest book ...

LUCY COOKE: I was delighted to fly to Seattle and meet this population of orcas.

HEATHER: ... she got wind of a pretty amazing discovery in killer whales.

LUCY COOKE: Yeah, this felt like a really, really important story, and one that I found inspirational.

HEATHER: It was a discovery that directly speaks to something that lots of humans are actually going to have to contend with at some point in their lives—including Lucy herself, and me and you.

MOLLY: Me.

HEATHER: You, Molly.

MOLLY: [laughs] Okay.

LUCY COOKE: So yeah.

HEATHER: So Lucy hopped on a plane.

LUCY COOKE: Flew to Seattle.

HEATHER: And then to get to the patch of the ocean north of Seattle where the whales actually live ...

LUCY COOKE: You get a sea plane. You get to feel like you're in a 1970s, you know, adventure TV series.

HEATHER: [laughs]

LUCY COOKE: [laughs] That's how everybody traveled in the 1970s was by sea plane, to go and deal with emergencies, you know?

HEATHER: But the actual reason Lucy was there was to get on a boat with a woman named ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Giles: Yeah.]

HEATHER: ... Deborah Giles.

DEBORAH GILES: So my name's Deborah Giles, Dr. Deborah Giles. But I just go by my last name, Giles.

LUCY COOKE: Yeah. I'd written to her offering up my services to join her on her research boat. Because I'd heard that she went out every day chasing orcas, trying to catch their poo in a net.

DEBORAH GILES: That's what I do.

HEATHER: Okay.

DEBORAH GILES: Yeah, my main job is poop collection.

LUCY COOKE: And the reason why is because, as she'll tell you, poop is a goldmine.

DEBORAH GILES: Yeah, absolutely.

HEATHER: Apparently you can learn a lot about whales by looking at their poop.

DEBORAH GILES: Everything you can imagine. Anything that you can get from a blood sample you can analyze through the feces.

HEATHER: Hormones, microbes, environmental chemicals.

DEBORAH GILES: Yes. So ...

HEATHER: So what they do is they go out in the boat until they spot this group of killer whales. And then ...

LUCY COOKE: You do what's called a distant poop follow.

HEATHER: Oh!

LUCY COOKE: And I believe that that is a scientific term. You follow at a little polite distance back.

HEATHER: Yeah, everyone needs some privacy.

LUCY COOKE: Exactly. You don't want to overcrowd them.

HEATHER: And at some point ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Giles: Got that smell?]

HEATHER: ... one of Giles' assistants ...

LUCY COOKE: A nonhuman research assistant.

HEATHER: Oh!

LUCY COOKE: Eba the dog, a former street dog from Sacramento.

HEATHER: ... will pick up a scent.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Giles: Give a smell.]

DEBORAH GILES: She'll go to the front of the boat.

HEATHER: Put her snout in the air.

DEBORAH GILES: Stand up on the bow.

HEATHER: And then lead them to it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Giles: Oh my goodness!]

HEATHER: Does the whale poop float at the surface?

DEBORAH GILES: Yes.

LUCY COOKE: We're not talking a solid turd, by any means. It's more of a ...

DEBORAH GILES: Thick pancake batter.

HEATHER: And then they just lean over the side of the boat with this plastic lab vial on the end of a stick.

DEBORAH GILES: And gently break the surface of the water.

HEATHER: And scoop up the poop.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: So the reason Lucy went to visit Giles and these whales is because the scientists who study them had noticed something odd.

DEBORAH GILES: There comes a time when we don't see the females in this population giving birth.

HEATHER: When they got to be around, like, 40 or so, the female whales just stopped having babies, even though they lived to be 70, 80, even, like, 100 years old. So ...

DEBORAH GILES: These females were living this long stretch of their life without having any new calves.

HEATHER: At first, the scientists thought they were having miscarriages maybe, or there was some kind of pollutant in the water or something that was causing these older females to stop having babies. But in 2017, Giles and this colleague of hers, Sam Wasser, published a poop analysis that confirmed a very different hypothesis that people had been considering for a couple of decades. They wrote—and I quote here, "The females in the population have undergone reproductive senescence."

MOLLY: Oh! Senescence?

HEATHER: Yeah. Which was, like, not a word I knew. But ...

MOLLY: Yeah.

HEATHER: But maybe you know it. I don't know.

MOLLY: Well ...

HEATHER: It's like a fancy way of saying that at a certain age the reproductive system of these whales started to physiologically shut down.

MOLLY: Hmm!

HEATHER: And along with a lot of other observations about the whales and autopsies of beached whales they were able to, like, confirm that these whales were going through menopause.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: [laughs] That's my big reveal, Molly!

MOLLY: I guess I maybe would have expected them to go through menopause. I mean I ...

HEATHER: You're not surprised? You're not surprised by this?

MOLLY: I don't know. I'm, like ...

HEATHER: Well, you kind of should be surprised, because ...

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: ... actually, up until they figured this out about the whales, scientists widely believed that menopause was a uniquely human thing.

MOLLY: Really?

HEATHER: Mm-hmm.

LUCY COOKE: Yeah. It was assumed that human females were the only species that went through it.

HEATHER: Out of, like, 6,000-some species of mammals, they thought we were the only ones.

LUCY COOKE: So we were just—yeah, we were just freaks.

HEATHER: And freaks because if you think about it scientifically, menopause is actually very weird. Like, it doesn't ...

MOLLY: Is this sort of you saying, like, this is weird, or do you think scientists are, like, "Yo, this is weird."

HEATHER: I mean, they would probably say it a little bit more fancy.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: So I'm—you know, I would just—well no, like, it is super weird, right? It is super weird.

HEATHER: Okay, so this is a scientist. His name is Kevin.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: And I have a long last name—Langergraber. Kevin Langergraber. I'm an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

HEATHER: And Kevin says from an evolutionary point of view, no animal should have what he calls ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: The substantial post-reproductive lifespan.

MOLLY: Substantial post-reproductive lifespan?

HEATHER: Fun phrase. [laughs]

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Yeah.

HEATHER: I asked him if we could say something more fun and he said no.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: No. So ...

HEATHER: Anyway, the point is, it's the living for a long time after you can no longer reproduce. That's the weird part.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: It shouldn't be—because from the perspective of evolution, right? What—evolution favors traits that get more genes into the next generation.

HEATHER: And if you're not having babies you're not sending your genes into the next generation.

LUCY COOKE: Natural selection takes a, you know, pretty dim view of the loss of fertility, and once you stop breeding you die. That's the general story.

MOLLY: And is natural selection really that cut and dry that it's if you're not contributing to the genetic pool you should be out?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Well of course, natural selection isn't everything, right? Not every trait you look at in an organism has a functional reason. But, you know, like the vast majority of mammal species, you end up reproducing until you die, then it's still super weird that a few don't.

HEATHER: Like, think about it this way: If there were a human woman who could keep having babies for her whole life until she dies, she would, genetically at least, outcompete the women who can't.

MOLLY: Hmm.

HEATHER: So it sort of seems like there should be some evolutionary genetic reason for the reproductive system to kind of peter out before the human person does.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: That is the evolutionary puzzle, right?

HEATHER: Now one of the most common things people say when they hear about this is that in humans this is kind of like a fluke of modern life.

LUCY COOKE: So the idea was is that—was that perhaps human females were living beyond their—their reproductive shelf life because we were being propped up by regular meals and modern medicine.

MOLLY: So the idea being that in olden times we used to die around menopause, and so this long post-reproductive life is just because now we live longer now that we used to?

HEATHER: Right. But it turns out actually that's not the case.

MOLLY: Which part?

HEATHER: [laughs]

MOLLY: Which part is not the case?

HEATHER: All of that is not true. None of that's true.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: In ancient times, people also lived to be about 70.

MOLLY: Really?

HEATHER: Yeah.

MOLLY: I just thought it was, like, the only people who did were, like, royals who were highly attended to.

HEATHER: No. The—so there's this interesting thing where, like, we get these average life expectancy numbers, and the averages take into account the fact that most people die before, like, the age of five because they ...

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: ... die in childbirth, they die of infant diseases.

MOLLY: Oh, it's like a skewed average.

HEATHER: Yeah, exactly.

MOLLY: Oh!

HEATHER: So if you account for that, you see that many women were, in fact, living 20, 25 years, 30 years after they could no longer reproduce. So humans have been going through menopause, like, for the entire history of humans.

LUCY COOKE: And it's a thing, menopause. It's a rollercoaster. You know, it's an emotional and physical rollercoaster.

HEATHER: And back to Lucy.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: She says that going into menopause for her was pretty brutal.

LUCY COOKE: I mean, hot sweats and furious moods.

HEATHER: And it's pretty brutal for a lot of women. But she also says ...

LUCY COOKE: Once it—its—I was going to say its icy fingers, but it's anything but icy. Once its hot fingers got a hold of me ...

HEATHER: ... she did have in the back of her mind this question, which was ...

LUCY COOKE: Why? Why was I still alive? [laughs]

MOLLY: That's a question!

HEATHER: Yeah, it's a pretty intense way to put it, but the thing about menopause ...

LUCY COOKE: You know, I mean, it's—I mean, I know it gets a lot of press now and everybody's allowed to talk about it, but in my mother's generation no one did.

HEATHER: ... for such a long time it's been completely ignored by science, by culture.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: And probably partly because of that, I do think a lot of women end up feeling invisible or useless.

LUCY COOKE: You know, you were just sort of irrelevant after going—after your periods stopped, you know? And you were kind of this sort of, you know, kind of gray puddle of purposelessness, you know?

HEATHER: [laughs] Oh God!

HEATHER: So Lucy ...

LUCY COOKE: So when I heard that killer whales went through menopause ...

HEATHER: It felt like a chance to ask what is this time in her life for in a kind of different, more scientific way?

DARREN CROFT: Yeah, so these—these are really big questions, and there are a number of ...

HEATHER: So this is a scientist named Darren Croft.

DARREN CROFT: I am a professor of animal behavior at the University of Exeter.

HEATHER: He's part of this huge team that's been studying these killer whales for—for, like, decades now.

LUCY COOKE: And so there's this incredible, rich amount of data on their behavior and their—and their movements.

HEATHER: And so what the scientists watching these whales day in, day out have seen is that ...

DEBORAH GILES: There's a lot of purpose. And we know that now. These females have rich social lives.

HEATHER: Lives that could make sense in, like, a cold, hard, evolutionary logic kind of way.

MOLLY: Hmm.

HEATHER: So for example, Giles and Darren told us about this one particular female killer whale named ...

DARREN CROFT: Granny, who's possibly the most famous wild killer whale in the world.

DEBORAH GILES: Granny, she was just an astonishing whale, who lived to be at least into her late 80s, possibly as old as 105.

HEATHER: And according to Darren and Giles, all the way up to the end ...

DEBORAH GILES: She had this zest for life.

HEATHER: Yeah, what does that look like?

DEBORAH GILES: Socializing, foraging, breaching, tail-slapping.

HEATHER: It does sound zesty for being old.

DEBORAH GILES: Yeah. Just living life.

HEATHER: Yeah.

HEATHER: And in particular, the scientists noticed she's actually a killer grandma.

DEBORAH GILES: Carried and played with and babysat brand-new babies.

HEATHER: Because the way these groups of killer whales usually work is ...

DARREN CROFT: Sons and daughters stay in their mom's household.

HEATHER: So granny's part of this sort of multi-generational pod.

DEBORAH GILES: Yes. Our colleagues captured drone imagery of Granny helping to corral a fish towards her great-grandcalf.

HEATHER: When Darren and his colleagues did a study of these killer whales, they found that the whales that had postmenopausal grandmas around like Granny ...

MOLLY: Whales who aren't having babies of their own anymore.

HEATHER: Right.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: When those ones were still around, the young had higher chances of survival than the whales who had no grandmas, or even had grandmas who were premenopausal. Does that make sense?

MOLLY: So the grandmas who couldn't have babies anymore were more helpful than the grandmas who were still having babies?

HEATHER: Right. And this actually gave, like, a lot of support to an idea that people had been thinking about in terms of humans, actually, for a while.

LUCY COOKE: The grandmother hypothesis.

MOLLY: I feel like I hear a lot about the grandmother hypothesis, but I'm not even sure I know how it works.

HEATHER: Yeah, right. But it's basically what we just learned with the whales.

DARREN CROFT: The hypothesis there is what's important is that post-reproductive females play an important role in the survival of their grand-offspring.

HEATHER: There's something that makes a lot of—I'll just say as a person with a two-year-old child—like, it makes a lot of sense to me. Like, you know, like, my mother is just, like, incredibly helpful and useful. I mean, that's data point of one. It's not scientific, but we feel how this is—like, makes some amount of sense, to be true.

DARREN CROFT: Yes. Yeah.

MOLLY: So this hypothesis is just, like, your evolutionary purpose is to be a mom, even if you are no longer being a mom.

HEATHER: Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the cultural takeaway. That's, like, what most of us think of, if you've ever heard of this before.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: But when you look at the whales, it goes way beyond that. Like, the older killer whale female, she's actually kind of running the show.

DEBORAH GILES: I mean, it was clear that Granny was the one in charge, the matriarch of all matriarchs.

HEATHER: They play diplomat or keeper of the peace, especially with the younger male whales.

DEBORAH GILES: Females, especially post-reproductive females are intervening in the lives of their adult sons, making sure that they're not roughhousing enough to get injured.

HEATHER: But also they're, like, hunter-in-chief.

LUCY COOKE: Leading the pod to find food to feed everybody.

HEATHER: Granny and her family have basically always exclusively eaten salmon.

LUCY COOKE: But those salmon are really hard to find now, because they've been hunted by humans.

HEATHER: But Granny, with her 11-pound, super-intelligent brain, she can remember things from, like, 25 years ago.

LUCY COOKE: Yeah. You know, 25 years ago, at this time of year, there was a bunch of salmon that did go up this random little tributary halfway up the coast.

HEATHER: And the scientists could, like, literally see this play out as they were watching the whales on these hunts.

DEBORAH GILES: Granny would just start slapping her tail on the water and, like, all the whales would go, like, "Whoop, Granny's calling. We're gonna go in the direction that she wants us all to go." That was something that we used to get to see quite often.

HEATHER: And even after she spent ...

DEBORAH GILES: Forty-five minutes or even an hour trying to catch a fish, you know, continuing, even though she was most assuredly hungry herself.

HEATHER: Giles said she would see her ...

DEBORAH GILES: Bite the fish in half or sometimes even in thirds, and have family members come over to grab that fish.

HEATHER: So the postmenopausal female whales, they might not be adding more of their genes to the gene pool but ...

LUCY COOKE: They're not sitting around filing their nails and—and watching daytime soap operas.

HEATHER: They're, like, totally crucial to the survival of the group.

LUCY COOKE: These orca females are the repositories for ecological wisdom. They're keeping their hunting community alive.

HEATHER: Does that make you think about your experience as a woman? I mean, whenever I ask scientists this question, they're like, "Don't ask this question."

LUCY COOKE: [laughs]

HEATHER: But I guess, did, like, looking the orca in the eye and thinking about Granny change anything for you?

LUCY COOKE: You know, I probably shouldn't answer this question. [laughs]

HEATHER: No, answer!

LUCY COOKE: But I will. I'll give you—I'll give you an honest answer. Because I did. I felt incredibly moved by them. I really did. I felt very—I was really pleased that I made the effort, and I went there and I spent time with Dr. Giles. And, you know, understanding how evolution had granted these females these long lives with such purpose made me think differently about my loss of fertility. And I found the idea that my value now was in my wisdom and my brain and the things that I can teach other people really empowering, as opposed to feeling like you're a gray puddle that's, you know, decreasing relevance in the world and, you know?

HEATHER: Yeah.

LUCY COOKE: It's the kind of—it's the opposite. You know, in every way I was like, "Be more orca!"

HEATHER: Yeah.

LUCY COOKE: Plus the fact that the older females are having tons of sex.

HEATHER: [laughs] Oh my God!

MOLLY: I mean, that sounds great.

HEATHER: Right.

MOLLY: I love the idea of, like, being an orca. But there is something in me that, like, just sort of fundamentally chafes at the idea that I have to be useful in some way, like, whether that's, like, being a caretaker or being, like, hunter in chief.

HEATHER: Right.

MOLLY: Like, it's like I always have to prove my worth.

HEATHER: Well ...

MOLLY: ... if I'm not there to have babies.

HEATHER: I think you'll be kind of happy to hear that, you know, that's not the only idea that science has about menopause. When we come back from break, I'm gonna tell you about another animal that's—I don't know, I think you might like this one.

MOLLY: All right, we're back for the second part of this episode.

HEATHER: Yeah. Okay, so let's—let's recap.

MOLLY: I love a recap.

HEATHER: We're talking about menopause.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: And how it's super weird.

MOLLY: Totally weird.

HEATHER: We thought for a long time we were the only ones who did it. And then scientists learned about orcas.

MOLLY: Right.

HEATHER: And scientists started watching them, and they sort of thought, "Oh, maybe we're solving this evolutionary puzzle."

MOLLY: Of, like, why we have menopause?

HEATHER: Of why we have menopause. But maybe not so much.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: So let me unpack that.

HEATHER: So again this is this guy Kevin Langergraber.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: We're really getting into the weeds here.

HEATHER: One important detail I didn't mention before about Kevin is that every year for the past 25 years, Kevin has spent time living what he called ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Chimp life.

HEATHER: Working on this thing called the Ngogo chimpanzee project.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Which is a long term study of this one community of chimpanzees.

HEATHER: It's in southwestern Uganda.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Pretty much smack dab in the middle of Kibale National Park.

HEATHER: So picture, like ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Huge, huge trees.

HEATHER: And a wide open forest floor.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Like, an open park.

HEATHER: Where every single day ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Get up in the morning, have your breakfast and your coffee. The sun is just starting to—to come up. That's when you want to leave and go find the chimps.

HEATHER: And then he spends the rest of his day just watching them.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Basically you're writing down what they do.

HEATHER: They're grooming, they're hunting, they're eating.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: So kind of right from the beginning of his time there, Kevin started to notice something interesting about the older female chimps.

MOLLY: Okay.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Like Garbo, for example.

MOLLY: She's an old-timey silent movie character? [laughs]

HEATHER: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: This—this female who now is about 72 years old.

MOLLY: No way! Seventy-two? That's, like, my—my mom's age.

HEATHER: Yeah. Kevin's actually known Garbo from the very beginning, since she was about 50.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: At which point ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: She already had adult kids.

HEATHER: But for the last 25 years, he's never seen her have a baby.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: But here's the thing, you know? Post-reproductive individuals, they exist, you know? There's always, like, the occasional old female who doesn't reproduce anymore.

HEATHER: But the thing Kevin wanted to figure out was, like, is Garbo an anomaly? Or is this something that's happening to more chimps than just her?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Exactly.

HEATHER: And to get to the bottom of that, he had to collect ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Biological samples.

MOLLY: [laughs] Okay, back to poop.

HEATHER: No, not poop. Pee.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Yeah. [laughs]

HEATHER: Urine.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Urine. Urine.

HEATHER: No shade to poop samples, obviously.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Urine collection is actually easier than fecal sample collection because they pee a lot more than they poo.

HEATHER: I don't know about "easy," though. Because what Kevin has to do is ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Is you get a stick from the forest. Picture a stick that's about three feet long.

HEATHER: And it looks kind of like a Y.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Sort of like a weird pitchfork or something.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: And he puts a little plastic bag on the end of the Y.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: And then when the chimps are up in a tree, they're peeing down on you. And you stick your stick out, you know, away from you so that you don't collect too much pee yourself, you know, on your head and stuff.

HEATHER: And you get this stream of pee to connect with your stick.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: And then it fills up that—that bag. This is highbrow science.

HEATHER: Now these pee samples, they're sort of like the whale poop. They can tell you a lot about what's happening in the bodies of individual chimps.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: Like Garbo, for example.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: You're just waiting for Garbo to pee. And then when she does, you'd better be ready.

HEATHER: So when Kevin analyzed her samples and the samples of other older female chimps ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: We found, you know, smoking gun sort of level of science that we rarely get.

HEATHER: Because looking at the levels of reproductive hormones ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: It was really just easy to tell that ...

HEATHER: Yep. Female chimps ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: ... Garbo and these other old females ...

HEATHER: ... go through menopause.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Yes.

MOLLY: Hmm.

HEATHER: And I mean, like, they go through menopause. It's very similar to the human experience.

MOLLY: Ooh!

HEATHER: Or at least we think it is. Kevin was very careful to mention that, like, "I can't speak to hot flashes."

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: No.

MOLLY: Right. Like, I can't speak to some of the physical symptoms or, like, the emotional swings.

HEATHER: Right.

MOLLY: But, like, there's a hormone cessation.

HEATHER: Right, right, right. And that cessation, it's pretty similar to the pattern in humans. It's like a ramping down, basically.

MOLLY: Wow.

HEATHER: And after that, they just keep on living their lives, for decades sometimes, just like humans and just like the whales.

MOLLY: And then there were three.

HEATHER: Yeah, exactly. Well, sort of. Actually, when they did all that orca research, they actually found out that there were a handful of other whales that are really similar to orcas that also go through menopause. So, like, narwhals.

MOLLY: Narwhals?

HEATHER: Yeah. But chimps are the third major animal group we know of that experience this long life after menopause.

MOLLY: Is Garbo also scratching her head, asking what life is for after menopause?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: No, she's not.

HEATHER: But Kevin definitely is.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Let's—let's think about it.

HEATHER: Okay, so I'm gonna, like, paint you a picture of what Garbo's life is like.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: Okay, so before she stopped having babies, she had three sons.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Monk, Richmond and Hutcherson.

HEATHER: By the way, why don't they name them, like, Steve or something?

MOLLY: It feels very, like, old money.

HEATHER: [laughs] I know! Like, who came with—okay, so Monk and Richmond actually aren't alive anymore. But let's just, like, imagine a time when they all were alive. Because, like, long story short, a big part of Garbo's day is hanging out with her sons.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: She had, like, you know, a good relationship with—with both Hutcherson and Richmond.

MOLLY: What about Monk?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: No. Monk, she hated Monk.

MOLLY: Oh!

HEATHER: Like, they didn't even know they were related until they did the genetic testing and they were like, "Oh, I guess she had three sons, not just two."

MOLLY: Scandal!

HEATHER: Yeah. Dang, Garbo.

MOLLY: [laughs] Dang, Garbo.

HEATHER: Anyway, so all day, Garbo, Hutcherson and Richmond would be together.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Richmond and Hutcherson would groom Garbo a lot.

HEATHER: Like, kind of running their fingers through her hair, and picking out bugs and, like, scratching her lower back.

MOLLY: Love it.

HEATHER: And she would totally bliss out.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Like, zone out in this really zen-like state. It's like—you know, I'm bald now, but I remember when I used to go to the hairdresser and get my hair cut. And you could feel, like, the hairdresser running their hands through your scalp. I would just zone out and ah ...

HEATHER: Also, Richmond and Hutcherson would bring food to Garbo.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: You know, share meat with Garbo.

HEATHER: Monkey meat.

MOLLY: Chimps eat monkey meats?

HEATHER: Yeah, it's a chimp delicacy. They love monkey meat.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: In the movie version of this, they would bring it to her on, like, a silver platter and honor her.

MOLLY: I mean, that's what's happening in my head.

HEATHER: [laughs]

MOLLY: So that—does that mean she doesn't have to hunt for herself?

HEATHER: Right. Also ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: If someone would be aggressive to—to Garbo often, you know, Richmond and Hutcherson would, like, chase them off, you know, protecting their mother.

MOLLY: Uh-huh.

HEATHER: And that's it. That's all that Garbo does. So, like, kind of notice here what you're not hearing.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: No real grandmothering behavior.

HEATHER: So Garbo is not making Christmas cookies for her grandchildren?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: No, she's not.

MOLLY: She's not doing anything toward the youth?

HEATHER: Or really towards anyone.

MOLLY: Oh really? Okay.

HEATHER: She's not super helpful.

MOLLY: Huh! God, that's—that's the dream. I want to be an old lady chimp.

HEATHER: Yeah. And so because ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: The grandmother hypothesis doesn't seem to apply to chimps.

HEATHER: Kevin and a bunch of the other scientists started looking into, like, what is going on here?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: The second-most prominent hypothesis is called this reproductive conflict hypothesis.

HEATHER: The reproductive conflict hypothesis.

MOLLY: I love that we've gone from, like, the grandmother hypothesis, which feels so loving, to ...

HEATHER: Reproductive conflict!

MOLLY: ... reproductive conflict.

HEATHER: Well, bear with me, because in some ways it's maybe the opposite, or it's maybe not quite what you think it's going to be.

MOLLY: I love that. Go.

HEATHER: Okay, and the theory itself is, like, a little bit convoluted, but ...

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: ... the big idea is that there's a sort of subtle evolutionary calculation hidden in the way chimpanzee females set up their families.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: In chimpanzees, males stay in their group for their whole lives.

HEATHER: But the females, the daughters, when they hit puberty, they leave their family group to join another one.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: The general reason for this is, like, avoid inbreeding, right?

MOLLY: Right.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: So think of this. Think if you're a female chimp. You're born in one group.

HEATHER: Then you hit, like, 12 or 13.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: You disperse to a new group, where you want to start having kids.

HEATHER: When you first get into that new family, you're not related to anybody around you. You don't share genes with anyone.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: But as you have your first kid—let's say you have a male.

HEATHER: Then you have one family member, your son, who does have your genes.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: It eventually grows up. It has its own kids.

HEATHER: Those kids have your genes.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: So you're just getting more related to group members ...

HEATHER: As you grow into an older female chimp.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: So now to zoom out a little bit ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Now here's the—why is it called the reproductive conflict hypothesis.

HEATHER: If you look at the larger group that the chimp female is a part of ...

MOLLY: Hmm.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: There's a limited amount of resources. And if you have a kid, that means that some other female in your group can't have a kid.

MOLLY: Yeah, it's just how basic ecology works.

HEATHER: Right.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Reproduction is a zero-sum game. So there's reproductive conflict between females.

HEATHER: And so if you're this older female chimp and you're looking around, maybe there are, like, new young females that have just joined your family. And you're like ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Who's gonna have the next kid, me or this young female?

MOLLY: Mm-hmm?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: If this young female has this kid, who is she gonna have it with? Well, it could be my son that has the kid with this young female, right?

HEATHER: And my genes will get passed down that way.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: So I'm gonna get some indirect fitness benefits through this young female's reproduction.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm? Mm-hmm?

HEATHER: On the other hand ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Can the young female say the same thing about the reproduction of this old female? No. She shares no genes with the hypothetical offspring of this old female.

HEATHER: So as the evolutionary math would have it ...

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Old females are predicted to sort of cede these reproductive opportunities to the young females and stop reproducing.

MOLLY: Oh! So it's like Garbo and other older female chimps can contribute to the group and get a benefit themselves just by bowing out and doing their own thing.

HEATHER: Right.

MOLLY: That's cool.

HEATHER: Yeah, that makes sense, right? Good theory.

MOLLY: Good theory.

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: But just like the grandmother hypothesis, it's not a perfect fit.

MOLLY: Why? Why? Why?

HEATHER: Well, apparently—so this gets kind of, like, math-y and nitpicky, but Kevin says that the benefits of these older females bowing out, they, like, don't quite make up for the fact that they're, like, living these long, luxurious post-reproductive lives, like, painting their nails and eating monkey meat. So it, like, maybe doesn't quite work.

MOLLY: Okay. Dammit! So is Kevin about to swoop in and be, like, "I've got my own hypothesis?"

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: No, I do not.

MOLLY: Oh, what?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: I do not.

MOLLY: Wait, so I'm just left hanging?

KEVIN LANGERGRABER: Right. Right. And left with—I don't know, just the—the magic and wonder of this world, right?

HEATHER: There's, like, not a grand universal theory of post-reproductive females.

MOLLY: Okay.

HEATHER: And it's still just like a real open question of why we or orcas or chimps live this long post-reproductive life.

MOLLY: Right. I mean, honestly, there's a part of me that's like, "Thank God!" Because if we had actually found an answer, it would have felt so prescriptive. [laughs] I don't know. It makes me feel like it would have been kind of sad.

HEATHER: I tot—like, I agree. I mean, I think it would be kind of limiting. And I think the thing is, one of the things I've loved about this reporting process of this story isn't really learning the theories, which are kind of confusing in a lot of ways, but actually learning about these specific animals like Granny and Garbo. And I'm just imagining their lives. Like, what do they do during that time?

MOLLY: Yeah.

HEATHER: And I feel like I've gotten to a point in my reporting where I'm much more interested in the what they're doing than the why does this happen, if that makes any sense.

MOLLY: Hmm.

HEATHER: And at some point I also remembered that there is, of course, that third animal that goes through menopause and has a long post-reproductive life.

HEATHER: Everyone feels good? Strong?

CAROLINE PAUL: Yes.

HEATHER: And so I called up one of them.

MOLLY: [laughs] Yes.

CAROLINE PAUL: My name is Caroline Paul. And I'm a writer, and my expertise is that I am post-menopausal. I'm 61 years old.

HEATHER: I mean, to be fair, Caroline also wrote an entire book that's basically a study of how women live their lives after menopause.

CAROLINE PAUL: Called Tough Broad: From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking, How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age.

HEATHER: And so I went to her and I asked her, like, "Okay, there's Granny, there's Garbo. Now tell me about Caroline."

MOLLY: I love that.

CAROLINE PAUL: You know, I think when I was young, I was really interested in metrics. So I wanted to be the first.

HEATHER: She's specifically this, like, very adventure-y kind of lady.

CAROLINE PAUL: Sometimes I was the first down a river, or I was the first to mountain bike through the Bolivian Andes.

MOLLY: And, like, Heather just got her driver's license.

HEATHER: [laughs] Yeah. I didn't just get it, but I am learning how to drive alone on the road. So, you know, everyone's in a different moment of their life. [laughs]

MOLLY: To each their own adventure.

HEATHER: Anyway, back to Caroline. When she started to have menopause symptoms—or, really, perimenopause symptoms ...

CAROLINE PAUL: It was almost like someone had, like, killed your dog and given you a weird acid drug at the same time for extended periods.

HEATHER: Like, in what sense is that the case?

CAROLINE PAUL: I was crying all the time, and eating at weird hours of the night. The other thing that kept happening is that I would go to parties and I wouldn't remember anybody's face.

MOLLY: Whoa!

HEATHER: And all of this went on for, like ...

CAROLINE PAUL: I think it was, like, four-and-a-half years.

MOLLY: Geez.

HEATHER: But this all kind of tracked with what she was expecting to happen, because she, like kind of all of us, had heard that this time in her life would be pretty brutal.

MOLLY: Right. The only thing you hear, it feels like, is how dreadful it will be.

HEATHER: Right.

CAROLINE PAUL: But I just remember around 57 suddenly realizing that I felt really different.

HEATHER: She felt, like, a lot calmer and clearer.

CAROLINE PAUL: There was no more sudden crying jags. I remembered everybody's name, everybody's face.

HEATHER: And that's when she realized ...

CAROLINE PAUL: Oh, now I'm in menopause.

HEATHER: And for this part of her life, she told me, really the only messaging she was getting is what, like, not to do.

CAROLINE PAUL: Narrowing life, not opening it up.

HEATHER: Because women, as they get older, are getting told things like ...

CAROLINE PAUL: We have to watch our bones. We have to watch our brain. Our cognitive health is on decline. We're told that as we age, we're losing things.

HEATHER: But beyond that, she kind of didn't have a roadmap.

CAROLINE PAUL: For menopausal women, women over 50, 60, we don't have a script anymore. There's a big gray area.

HEATHER: She felt kind of lost. Meanwhile, men her age, everywhere they look, they have tons of scripts, tons of icons.

CAROLINE PAUL: I mean, Harrison Ford is still running through tombs, Tom Cruise is jumping off some high building somewhere.

HEATHER: And she was like, "Why can't we have that?" So she set out to write this book, which became ...

CAROLINE PAUL: The quest to understand whether I should have outdoor adventure in my life.

HEATHER: And she met all of these different women in their 60s and 70s and 80s that were doing, like, totally badass stuff.

CAROLINE PAUL: From base jumping as a grandmother, to sea kayaking to BMX bike racing.

MOLLY: These are not women who were worried about bones breaking.

HEATHER: Not at all. And, like, while that's great and I'm all for it but, you know, as somebody who's maybe not the most physically adventurous person, I also really appreciated some of the other stories she told me about women who are going on quieter but still very meaningful adventures.

CAROLINE PAUL: I went birdwatching with someone in a wheelchair.

HEATHER: And she talked to this kind of amazing woman who learned how to swim in her 60s.

MOLLY: Oh, cool!

HEATHER: And it was very scary for her, but she—she still pushed herself to do it.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: So—and what she found was, like, not just a bunch of role models for her.

MOLLY: Yeah.

HEATHER: But she also found that for a lot of these women ...

CAROLINE PAUL: Instead of closing down their life, had found new aspects of themselves.

HEATHER: Finding new possibilities for their life, and they kind of had these new capacities for awe and wonder and bravery that they had never tapped into before.

CAROLINE PAUL: Yeah. I mean, I think that this is a time of great exploration that we should be grabbing hold of. There are new permutations and very ones of us as we age.

MOLLY: It's like the minute hypothesis is just to flip the script or something, that no script is the script.

HEATHER: Yeah. Right. Exactly.

CAROLINE PAUL: And I wonder if one of the—the sort of uses of us, if we're gonna be that, let's say scientific about it, is simply to show the younger generation that life is gonna get better. I have seen personally that when young people see how our lives are at this age, I think all that is of great value. So we don't really have to put a lot of work into that, we can just go and be our best selves. We should be sitting in that tree, being fed delectable meats and doing whatever we want.

MOLLY: Thank you, Heather.

HEATHER: You too, Molly.

MOLLY: Good luck on your ...

HEATHER: On my driving journey?

MOLLY: [laughs] Not on the driving journey, the menopause journey.

HEATHER: Oh, yeah. Right. Our menopause journey.

MOLLY: You've got some time.

HEATHER: Hopefully. [laughs]

MOLLY: Yeah, maybe we'll be—we'll be holding hands and base jumping together.

HEATHER: [laughs] I don't think so! Let's go birdwatching.

MOLLY: Okay.

MOLLY: Heather might not have jumped out of planes, but she has done plenty of stories for us over the years. And one of them is a very delightful conversation with Lulu and Latif called "Butt Stuff." And it is based on Heather's book called Butts: A Backstory.

MOLLY: By the way, Lucy Cooke's latest book has a bunch of other stories about the lives of females of many, many different species. It is well worth checking out. It is called Bitch. And when you are done with that, you can just move on over to Tough Broad by Caroline Paul. It is a book about the outdoors and aging, and how those things go together.

HEATHER: Special thanks to Danielle Friedman, Rachel Gross, Sam Wasser, Sam Ellis and Kate Radke. This episode was reported by Heather Radke with help from Becca Bressler. It was produced by Sarah Qari and Becca Bressler. It was also edited by Becca Bressler and fact-checked by Emily Krieger.

MOLLY: I now have to do something on these credits that I don't really want to do, which is actually say goodbye to the Becca Bressler, who you just heard a ton about. This is Becca's last episode at Radiolab. You may remember her from her on-air hits about voter profiling and the economics of food delivery systems. And that one thing about the bug bite tool and whether or not it worked. On the inside of the show we know her for all of that and also her just, like, crazy fast editing style, like, her strategy brain, her sharp, sharp, sharp sense of humor, and also her ability to sing Billy Joel at a level that is unbelievable, and I hope you all get to hear at some point. Becca, we love you, we will miss you. It's been a really rad eight years—I can't believe it's been eight years! And yeah, I can't wait to see what you do next, all of us can't wait. We'll miss you. Bye!

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm David and I'm in McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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