These fully grown sea lions won't stop nursing, and scientists don’t know why
CBC
Alexandra Childs never quite got used to the sight of fully grown Galápagos Islands sea lions happily suckling from their mothers’ teats.
“You did a double take every time you came across it,” Childs, a PhD candidate in behavioural and marine biology at Germany's University of Bielefeld, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“You went back to the computer, like, ‘I've got to check the age again. Am I sure that this is what's happening?’ It blew our minds.”
Childs is the lead author of a new study documenting the prevalence of so-called “supersuckler” sea lions in the Galápagos, published last month in the journal the American Naturalist.
The researchers found roughly 11 per cent of the population kept feeding on their mothers’ milk well into adulthood. Childs said it would be like if humans kept breastfeeding into their teens and 20s.
“Why? We have no idea,” Childs said. “We can't understand why mothers would continue to allow this, because it's a lot of energy to give away to an offspring who is able to hunt for themselves.”
The study looks at 20 years of data from a population of Galápagos sea lions, whose scientific name is Zalophus wollebaeki.
Sea lions can live to be about 23 years old, Childs said. Most of the Zalophus wollebaeki weaned from their mothers between the ages of 1.5 and 4.5 years, just before they reach sexual maturity, which is exactly what the researchers would have expected.
Not so for the supersucklers.
“These guys are carrying on way beyond that threshold,” Childs said.
The oldest individual they observed suckling, she said, was 16 years old — though that appears to be an aberration, not the norm.
"So that's [like] someone in their 60s still breastfeeding,” Childs said.
Some of them, she said, made a group activity out of it, forming what the New York Times dubbed “multigenerational suckling trains.”
“We saw the three of them in a row with mom nursing on the older female, and the baby nursing on the mum,” Childs told CBC. “So we had grandmother, mom and baby.”
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