A study from a decade ago equated the damage caused to health by not having friends to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The benefits of the company may not be exclusive to human beings. A study that analyzes almost 1,000 mammals concludes that species that live in groups generally live longer than solitary ones.
The research, published in ‘Nature Communications’, includes animals such as the golden snub-nosed monkey, which, although it is in danger of extinction, reaches 20 years; the naked mole rat, a 35-gram prodigy of nature that lives more than 30 years without a trace of cancer; the bowhead whale, which can exceed a miraculous 200 years; and the horseshoe bat, which reaches thirty. They are all gregarious.
Mammals exhibit a wide variety of social organizations, including solitary living, paired living, and various forms of group living. They also show a 100-fold variation in maximum lifespan, from 2 years in shrews to over 200 years in bowhead whales.
predation and starvation
Previous research on individual species, such as chacma baboons, found that individuals with strong social ties live longer than those with weak ones. Group living has been found to limit the risk of predation and starvation, which may improve mammalian longevity. However, analyzes between different species have been limited. Furthermore, the molecular mechanisms underlying the evolutionary relationships between sociability and longevity in mammals, which are important for understanding their evolution, are unclear.
Xuming Zhou, Ming Li, and their colleagues at the Beijing Institute of Zoology in China analyzed 974 mammal species to compare three categories of social organization (solitary, paired, and group) with longevity. Species that lived in groups included the Asian and African elephant, ring-tailed lemur, mountain zebra, and horseshoe bat. And solitary species included the dugong, anteater, and eastern chipmunk.
They found that group-dwelling species generally live longer than solitary species, supporting the correlated evolution of social organization and longevity. For example, northern short-tailed shrews (which are solitary) and great horseshoe bats (which live in groups) have similar weights, but maximum lifespans of about 2 and 30 years, respectively.
According to the authors, the findings provide a foundation for further experiments and follow-up investigations into the mechanisms behind group living and longevity.