Science-Backed Lessons From Dolphins

Healthy Aging

Boosting Our Quality of Life: What Dolphins Have to Teach Us

Tomorrow is National Dolphin Day, and there is so much to celebrate. Seriously, who doesn’t love dolphins? This week, let’s dive into the science behind happy, healthy dolphins… and what they have to teach us about improving our own quality of life. Which, by the way, also supports both our healthspan and longevity.

Dolphin Lesson #1: You be you. While also being part of a community.

In a 32 year-long study, Evans et al. observed behaviors among 179 wild bottlenose dolphins living in Shark Bay, Australia. This is a particularly healthy dolphin population that: 1) has individuals with a relatively long lifespan, 2) has no clear social hierarchy, and 3) is a fission-fusion society, where social group compositions and sizes are constantly changing. This impressive longitudinal study among social, long-lived mammals confirmed the following:

• Individuals maintain the same personalities (i.e. extroverts vs. introverts, foraging preferences, and time in small versus large groups) throughout their lives.
• Males had male buddy systems, and females had female buddy systems.
• The diversity of personalities, paired with changing social group compositions over time, supported a healthy overall community.

Translation for humans: Embrace your personality, reliably have buddies (who may change over time), and stay active in your community. In turn, and as described by Iannuzzi et al., healthy socialization helps us live longer.

Dolphin Lesson #2: Get your deep sleep.

As described by Lyamin et al., dolphins and their fellow cetaceans experience unihemispheric slow wave sleep, which is unique from other mammals. Let’s break that down.

• Unihemispheric sleep means that, while one half of the brain sleeps, the other half stays awake. This allows dolphins to get their rest, all while being able to stay vigilant.
• Slow wave sleep means deep sleep. For us humans, as shown by Mazzotti et al., longevity is tied to maintaining that deep sleep, which tends to degrade as we age.

Translation for humans: Admittedly, as much as some of us would love to be able to effectively sleep and be awake at the same time, there’s not much we can do about that. What we can do, however, is protect our deep sleep. Interestingly, in addition to showing that people who live longer maintain slow-wave sleep, Mazzotti et al. also showed that this healthier sleep was linked to healthier lipid profiles (aka higher HDL-cholesterol and lower triglycerides).

Dolphin Lesson #3: Include fish as part of your routine diet.

The dolphin diet consists primarily of fish, which is a core component of longevity-supporting diets in humans.

Translation for humans: In their review, Santa et al. describe the “Mediterranean-styled Japanese Diet” as a means to support healthy longevity. Specifically, they call out the shared dietary components of vegetables, beans, and fish between the Mediterranean and traditional Japanese diets and share how this combination can prolong our healthy state, in part by keeping our metabolic and immune systems healthy and balanced.