# On age-specific selection and extensive lifespan beyond menopause

## TL;DR

This study uses an agent-based model to explore how age-specific investment strategies like grandmother-care influence the evolution of post-reproductive lifespan, revealing that combined strategies can extend lifespan beyond menopause.

## Contribution

It demonstrates through simulation that multiple investment strategies, especially grandmother-care, promote extensive post-reproductive lifespan, and highlights how adding mother-care can limit this extension.

## Key findings

- Extensive PRLS emerges with combined investment strategies including grandmother-care.
- Mother-care introduction reduces the extent of PRLS by shifting contributions to mid-life.
- Agent-based modeling reveals age-specific selection impacts lifespan evolution.

## Abstract

Extensive post reproductive lifespan (PRLS) is observed only in a few species, such as humans or resident killer whales, and its origin is under debate. Hypotheses like mother-care and grandmother-care invoke strategies of investment--provision to one's descendants to enhance one's overall reproductive success--to explain PRLS. The contribution of an investment strategy varies with the age of the caregiver, as the number of care-receiving descendant changes with age. Here we simulated an agent based model, which is sensitive to age-specific selection, to examine how the investment strategies in different hypotheses affect survival and reproduction across different stages of life. We found that extensive PRLS emerges if we combine multiple investment strategies, including grandmother-care but not mother-care, which allow an individual to have an increasing contribution as it ages. We also found that, if mother-care is further introduced to the PRLS-enabling strategies, it will let contribution at mid-life to substitute contribution at late life, which consequently terminates extensive PRLS.