Is aging something we can control? Most living creatures grow old, but some do it more slowly than others.
A new study published in the journal PNAS suggests that migration might affect how fast animals age.
To explore this question, scientists studied the pink flamingo, a beautiful bird often seen in the Camargue region of France.
Thanks to a 40-year research project led by the Tour du Valat institute, researchers discovered something surprising: flamingos that migrate each year age more slowly than those that stay in one place.
In this species, some birds stay in the Camargue their entire lives. These are called residents. Others travel across the Mediterranean each winter to countries like Italy, Spain, or North Africa. These are the migrants.
At first, the resident birds seem to have the advantage. When they are young adults, they survive better and have more babies because they are already settled in a safe environment. But over time, this early advantage disappears.
As they age, resident flamingos suffer more health problems. They experience a faster decline in reproduction and have a higher risk of dying. In fact, residents age 40% faster than the migratory birds. The average age when aging starts for residents is 20.4 years, while for migrants it is 21.9 years.
The researchers believe this happens because of a trade-off between living well when young and staying healthy when older. The residents use more energy early in life to survive and reproduce, but this might wear out their bodies faster.
The migrants, who face more challenges early in life due to the stress of travel, may actually preserve their health and energy for later years, aging more slowly as a result.
This discovery shows that migration—a behavior shared by billions of animals—can change how quickly animals age. It also helps us understand that not all members of a species age the same way. Factors like lifestyle, behavior, and environment play a big role.
The study would not have been possible without the long-term monitoring of flamingos. Since 1977, researchers have been tagging the birds with rings and tracking them with telescopes. This has created a unique dataset that is helping scientists unlock the secrets of aging.
One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Hugo Cayuela from the University of Oxford, said that understanding how and why aging happens has been a question of interest for thousands of years. People used to think aging differences happened mostly between species.
But now, scientists are learning that even within the same species, individuals can age at different rates because of their genes, lifestyle, and environment.
By studying animals like flamingos, scientists hope to learn more about how aging works and why it happens. This could help us answer one of the biggest questions in biology: why do we age and die?
The research was led by scientists from the CNRS, the University of Oxford, and the Tour du Valat, among others. Tour du Valat is a research center in southern France that studies wetlands, one of the most threatened ecosystems on Earth. Since 1954, it has worked to protect these areas by combining science with community and government efforts.
The study is published in PNAS.
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