> When they combined their data, they found that female short-finned pilot whales stopped reproducing around the age of 36, but still lived for about 14 years m

> When they combined their data, they found that female short-finned pilot whales stopped reproducing around the age of 36, but still lived for about 14 years more. For the first time ever, Marsh and Kasuya had discovered menopause in a non-human animal. > Despite the breakthrough finding, which challenged our understanding of a fundamental biological process, reaction to her talk was less than positive. “The mainly male audience was quite scathing,” Marsh says. “They couldn’t believe that there would be females in a population that had stopped breeding, because the reason they were there was to breed.” Wow. Even though this was 1981, this is evidence for an intensely blinkered viewpoint in the field. This was the heyday of r/K selection theory (coined by E.O. Wilson in 1967), and it should be completely obvious that ceteceans are classic K-strategists. Given that, why wouldn't females stick around until their youngest calves reached sexual maturity (at 12-ish), especially in a highly social species? Taking the position that females' relevance ends with reproduction isn't just sexist, under the circumstances it actually seems like motivated reasoning. There are other counterarguments that can be made, but most of them (like group selection favoring more overlap in lifespans within a ship-of-Theseus pod) would be somewhat ahistorical, since this happened when acceptance of group selection was at its lowest point.