My mother-in-law came to visit us in California last week. She is an avid follower of my blog (!), so I was excited to learn what she thought of my most recent post. She hated it. That is, she said of my report that loons get old:”I could have told you that!”. Naturally, I was deflated. To think that 23 years in the field had produced a result deemed pedestrian by my mother-in-law!

While one might argue that she is family and should have been blindly supportive of my work, Joanne is right, in a sense. As humans, we are accustomed to old age and deterioration of the elderly. But, as I tried to explain, senescence is not the rule in all animals. Birds are unusual, in fact, as they exhibit relatively late and gradual senescence compared to mammals of similar body size. So the striking and rather sudden senescence that I reported recently is mildly surprising for the taxonomic Class Aves. Still, I think I agree with Joanne that it is not terribly shocking!

But there is more. The blog where I reported senescence in adult loons was based on an analysis that pooled male and female individuals. Since then, I have analyzed the sexes separately. The results are striking. As the figures below show, the senescence that I reported for the species as a whole (measured by decreased survival) is driven purely by males. While males and females that have been on territory from 1 to 14 years survive at a rate of 95% annually, males with 15 or more years on territory only survive at a rate of 58%. (Old females show a very modest decline in survival to about 91%.) Since males and females that settle on territories are almost always 5 years old or older, we can say with confidence that territorial males in their twenties drop like flies; females, in contrast, are survivors.

I don’t know if my mother-in-law will be impressed by these data. For the moment, I must be content in the knowledge that I have found a strong and highly unusual survival pattern. As a behavioral ecologist, this stunning disparity leads to several other questions. Among them are: 1) Do older males exhibit any other evidence of deterioration such as in territory defense, chick production or body condition? and 2) Does the high mortality of older males cause the adult sex ratio to swing towards females such that females are forced to wait years before finding a mate? Rest assured that I am exploring these possibilities with great enthusiasm.