Molly Webster

I mean, hot sweats and furious moods.

And it's pretty brutal for a lot of women.

That's a question.

Yeah, it's a pretty intense way to put it.

For such a long time, it's been completely ignored by science, by culture.

And probably partly because of that, I do think a lot of women...

End up feeling invisible or useless.

So when I heard that killer whales went through menopause, it felt like a chance to ask, what is this time in her life for?

In a kind of different, more scientific way.

So this is a scientist named Darren Croft.

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...