An assortment of tree-living mammals
In The Descent of Man, Darwin talked about the benefits of life among the treetops, citing the “power of quickly climbing trees, so as to escape from enemies”. Around 140 years later, these benefits have been confirmed by Milena Shattuck and Scott Williams from the University of Illinois.
By looking at 776 species of mammals, they have found that on average, tree-dwellers live longer than their similarly sized land-lubbing counterparts. Animals that spend only part of their time in trees have lifespans that either lie somewhere between the two extremes or cluster at one end. The pattern holds even when you focus on one group of mammals – the squirrels. At a given body size, squirrels that scamper across branches, like the familiar greys, tend to live longer than those that burrow underground, like prairie dogs.
These results are a good fit for what we already know about the lives of fliers and gliders. If living in the trees delays the arrival of death, taking to the air should really allow lifespans to really take flight. And so it does. Flight gives bats and birds an effective way of escaping danger, and they have notably longer lives than other warm-blooded animals of the same size. Even gliding mammals too tend to live longer than their grounded peers.
The two-toed sloth is a walking hotel. The animal is so inactive that its fur acts as an ecosystem in its own right, hosting a wide variety of algae and insects. But the sloth has another surprise passenger hitching a ride inside its body, one that has stayed with it for up to 55 million years – a virus.
In the Cretaceous period, the genes of the sloth’s ancestor were infiltrated by a “foamy virus“, one of a family that still infects humans, chimps and other mammals today. They are examples of retroviruses, which reproduce by converting an RNA genome into a DNA version and inserting that into the genome of whatever animal they’re infecting. If these hitchhikers become permanent tenants, as so often happens, they become known as endogenous retroviruses or ERVs.
ERVs act as a sort of viral fossil record, telling us about the ancient viruses that infected ancestral animals. In the sloth’s case, its ERVs tell us that foamy viruses must have been doing the rounds among ancient mammals over 100 million years ago, back when the dinosaurs still ruled the planet.
Despite the passing of a geological age, their descendants still circulate today and are astonishingly unchanged. The modern viruses look very similar to the one that inserted its genetic material into the sloth’s ancestors. That’s especially amazing because retroviruses – take HIV as an example – have a reputation for mutating at incredibly high rates.