Background: It is thought that all animals age: they show an increased probability of death at greater ages. However, the lifespans of many animals vary widely. What is it that determines whether or not an animal lives for one year or one hundred years? One of the key drivers is thought to be how likely you are to be killed by something else. Those animals that that are unlikely to be eaten, whether that is because they are very large (elephants), well armoured (tortoises) or poisonous (poison dart frogs), tend to evolve lower rates of ageing. After all, if you are going to live for a long time anyway, you might as well make the most of it. On the other hand, if you live precariously from day to day then there isn’t much point in investing later in life because you probably won’t get that far.

What we did: We compared lifespans of amphibians and snakes that either had a chemical defense (in amphibians) or venom (in snakes) with those that did not have those traits. We showed that (accounting for their evolutionary history) poisonous amphibians had a significantly longer lifespan than non-poisonous amphibians, but there was no difference in venomous and non-venomous snakes.

Importance: This study has two major implications. The first is that it is vital to incorporate evolutionary history into these sorts of analyses. We had built our study on the findings of an earlier piece of work (which did not account for evolutionary history) that suggested that the snakes also showed a longer lifespan when they were venomous, but our results refute that earlier finding. Second, our findings offer yet more evidence for an offensive role for the origins of snake venom, which has been suggested in other recent studies.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Species with a chemical defense, but not chemical offense, live longer”, was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology in 2013. You can find this paper at the publisher or for free at Figshare.

Image credit: Ephraimstochter, http://bit.ly/1xHxpks, Public Domain.