According to an American study, the discovery of common characteristics between humans and dolphins
Amman Today
publish date 1970-01-01 03:00:00
Dolphins may soon join the list of preclinical animals, after discovering a great similarity between them and humans in metabolism, as a study led by Duke University in the United States found that glass-nosed dolphins burn calories at a lower rate as they age, just as they do Humans.
This is the first time scientists have measured age-related metabolic slowdowns in other large-sized species besides humans, said first author Rebecca Rimbach, a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary anthropology at Duke University..
In the study published in the latest issue of the “Journal of Experimental Biology”, Rimbach studied energy expenditure and other aspects of physiology in animals ranging from mice to monkeys, but says that data on marine mammals such as dolphins and whales were scarce. The difficulty of restoring these ocean dwellers to repeat measurements.
The researchers studied 10 bottlenose dolphins between the ages of 10 and 45 that lived in two marine mammal facilities, the Dolphin Research Center in Florida and Dolphin Quest in Hawaii..
To measure the average daily metabolic rate, the researchers used the “double-described water method,” used to measure energy expenditure in humans since the 1980s, a method that involves having animals drink a few ounces of water while adding “heavy” forms of naturally occurring hydrogen and oxygen..
Like humans who extend their arms to draw blood, dolphins in these facilities voluntarily lift their fins out of the water so that their caretakers can collect blood or urine as part of their regular checkups..
By analyzing levels of heavy hydrogen and oxygen atoms in their blood or urine, the team was able to calculate how much carbon dioxide the dolphins produce each day, and thus the number of calories they burn while going about their lives..
The researchers expected that dolphins would have fast metabolisms, because dolphins are warm-blooded, just like humans, and maintaining warmth requires more energy in water than in air, but despite living in an aquatic world, they found that bottlenose dolphins burn 17 percent less energy. % per day of what would be expected for a mammal of its size.
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