Age - a question for my all-knowing friends-list

[andrewducker]

Ed was asking on Facebook what it would be like if we didn't age visibly so much - after all, other animals don't tend to.

Is this actually true?  Thinking about it, most other animals don't seem to get wrinkled in the same way, nor does their fur turn completely white or all fall out.  But is this just some animals?  Do other animals age visibly the same way we do?  Or is there something odd about people?

Comments

[andrewducker]

Hang on, are you saying that dogs won't notice the colour of another animal changing?

If I took a poodle and dyed it purple, then all of its poodle friends would fail to notice that anything had happened to it?

That seems...unlikely to me.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

No. That's the round trip fallacy at work there.

I am saying that it's likely that ageing does occur in other animals but that, to our eyes, it occurs more subtely then we might notice but for members of the same species it is noticable. This is testable in various ways - observing the mate choices of a group of animals and relating it to age. Is age a factor in mate choice? Are young mates preferred over older mates for example. Although there will be confounds and age probably turns out to be a proxy for physical strength.

Arguably predatory or scavenging animals would be predisposed to noticing other animals ages but I'd hazard a guess and say that it might be less important for grazing and other herbivorous animals to gauge the age of other animals. Although that doesn't explain why we would be bad at noticing age in other animals so the hypothesis seems crucially flawed from the get go.

Has anyone done any research to suggest that dying dogs hair affects how other dogs relate to them? I would perhaps suggest that a better example would be dipping a dog in some noxious perfume or other might be better...

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. I agree it's likely (although not certain - if animals tend to die before they get too old to mate successfully then there's no reason to be able to spot it) - but this is the reason my original post was specifically asking about _visible_ signs, because humans do signal it visibly, and I was wondering why it wasn't quite so visibly obvious in other animals.