Molly Webster

He's part of this huge team that's been studying these killer whales for like decades now.

And so what the scientists watching these whales day in, day out have seen is that... There's a lot of purpose.

Lives that could make sense in like a cold, hard evolutionary logic kind of way.

So, for example, Giles and Darren told us about this one particular female killer whale named...

And in particular, the scientists noticed she's actually a killer grandma.

So Granny's part of this sort of multi-generational pod.

When Darren and his colleagues did a study of these killer whales, they found that the whales that had postmenopausal grandmas around, like Granny... Whales who aren't having babies of their own anymore.

Right.

Okay.

When those ones were still around...

The young had higher chances of survival than the whales who had no grandmas or even had grandmas who were premenopausal.

Does that make sense?

So the grandmas who couldn't have babies anymore were more helpful than the grandmas who were still having babies.

Right.

And this actually gave like a lot of support to an idea that people have been thinking about in terms of humans, actually, for a while.

The grandmother hypothesis.

I feel like I hear a lot about the grandmother hypothesis, but I'm not even sure I know how it works.

Yeah, right.

But it's basically what we just learned with the whales.

There's something that makes a lot of, I'll just say as a person with a two-year-old child, like makes a lot of sense to me.