In her two-woman play, The Orca Show, performer Aysan Celik portrays a midlife woman trying to make sense of the menopausal transition with the help of an orca guide. After all, menopause is a shared experience for the two characters; orcas are one of the few species aside from ours that experience it. 

At one point, the orca silently points a remote at a screen, conjuring advertisements touting various menopause-related remedies and treacly headlines of self-help pieces aimed at older women. These are followed by footage of orca pods, their black dorsal fins slicing powerfully through the surface of the water, their bodies rolling and grazing lithely against each other underneath the waves. 

Oh yes, I thought when the orcas came on the screen during a performance of the play’s recent run in Seattle, I want that. 

Orca menopause is sometimes portrayed as a kind of girl-power alternative to the cultural narratives of the youth-obsessed, peptide-chasing modern West, in which menopause signifies the loss of a woman’s fertility, the fading of her beauty, the onset of cognitive and emotional struggles, and general decrepitude.

And there’s a lot that’s aspirational about the lives of orca matriarchs.

Killer whales don’t develop visible-to-us signs of aging like wrinkles and saggy breasts; even the oldest females retain their crisp black-and-white markings, their sleek yet powerful forms.

Post-menopausal orcas continue to have active sex lives: biologist Deborah Giles of the SeaDoc Society recalls that a famous orca matriarch known as J2 or Granny, who may have lived to be over 100 years old, was still getting some in the last years of her life, often with young-adult males to boot. 

Most of all, menopause is when female orcas come into their greatest cultural and intellectual power.

Among the southern resident killer whales, a population of salmon-eating orcas who inhabit the waters off Washington State and British Columbia and the community to which Granny belonged, post-reproductive females hold ecological knowledge: they often lead their family groups while foraging, especially in years when salmon are scarce.

If you have to go through menopause, wouldn’t you want to do it orca-style? 

But there are risks in imposing ourselves on orcas in this way, in making their lives a projection of ours. “That's dangerous,” chuckles Mia Nielsen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, when I ask her what we humans can learn from orcas about menopause and valuing older females. 

There’s a history of scientists misperceiving orca societies based on human-centric assumptions. When scientists began paying close attention to the southern residents in the early 1970s, they at first thought that groups of orcas traveling together were males with harems of females, or nuclear families headed by an adult male and his mate.

In fact they were matrilines: an older female, her sons and daughters, her daughters’ offspring, and sometimes even her granddaughters’ offspring. 

Then again, the insistence that humans are sui generis can also lead us astray, scientifically. Ironically, one 2016 paper called the notion that orcas experience menopause at all “inappropriate anthropomorphism.”

From a scientific perspective, menopause shouldn’t exist.

In theory, evolution should favor individuals who maximize opportunities to pass on their genes by continuing to reproduce right up until they die, not ones who hang around for decades after welcoming their last offspring.

Some scientists have hypothesized that there must be some other, less obvious evolutionary advantage to menopause. Others argue that menopause is merely a byproduct of the fact that millions of years ago some proto-mammalian ancestor began to produce all her egg follicles while still a developing embryo, giving all of us who descend from her a finite reproductive lifespan.

Post-reproductive lifespans have now been documented in five species of toothed whales: killer whales, false killer whales, short-finned pilot whales, belugas, and narwhals.

The trait appears to have evolved independently multiple times in the toothed whale lineage, and even closely related species may not share it: short-finned pilot whales go through menopause, but long-finned pilot whales do not. 

“It really feels like it's a trait that's on a knife edge,” says Andrew Foote, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo in Norway. “Like there's some magic ingredient where it manifests itself in some species or some populations, but not others.”

Much of what we know about the evolution of menopause in non-human animals comes from orcas, specifically the southern residents and a separate but neighboring population called the northern residents, who are also salmon-eaters. These are the best-studied groups of orcas in the world; for more than 50 years, scientists have used the whales’ distinctive dorsal fins and saddle-patch markings to track individuals over time, yielding richly textured family histories. 

Studies of resident orcas suggest that menopause may share common evolutionary roots in killer whales and humans.

One analysis showed that a young orca who grows up with their grandmother around is more likely to survive, especially if the grandmother is post-reproductive, lending support to the so-called grandmother hypothesis of menopause.

Another study revealed that when an orca gives birth around the same time as her daughter, the older female’s offspring doesn’t fare as well as the younger female’s, suggesting that menopause may function to reduce competition for resources between generations.

Support for both these hypotheses, which are not mutually exclusive, has also been found in studies of human populations. 

But orca life-histories tell another story, too – one that is not about mothers and daughters and grand-offspring but about mothers and sons.

In the year after a resident orca mother dies, her sons face a dramatically increased risk of dying themselves – even fully grown males over age 30. This pattern is seen for mothers of all ages, but is more pronounced for menopausal matriarchs. 

Male killer whales with a post-reproductive mother around also show fewer tooth-rake marks than males who have lost their mother, suggesting that her presence can reduce social conflict on his behalf. Among resident orcas, it’s the largest, oldest males who sire most of the calves. So the longer a mom can stick around and make sure her son survives and has a secure place in orca society, the more likely he is to pass on his – and by extension her – genes.

In the last several years, scientists have shown that menopause also occurs in a third genetically distinct population of Pacific Northwest orcas, a group of marine-mammal hunters known as transient or Bigg’s orcas. Among resident killer whales, both sons and daughters stay with their mother their entire lives, but Bigg’s orcas have a more fluid social structure.

Adult daughters often bud off from their mother’s group, and while sons sometimes spend time with buddies from other matrilines they are more likely to remain their mother’s constant companion throughout life. This may both reduce reproductive competition between mothers and daughters and give older moms opportunities to help their adult sons, researchers say.

If you’ve gotten invested in the girl-power narrative of orca menopause, this news might seem like a bit of a letdown: all that matrilineal structure, all that post-menopausal power, and in the end it’s all about…the guys?

But think about it from another angle: male killer whales are up to twice as large as females, and need a lot more nutrition to sustain that bulk. Sure, male killer whales are impressive specimens of raw top-predator power. But they’re also giant, unwieldy sacks of genes who rely on their lean, efficient post-menopausal moms to provision them. So much for females being the weaker sex.

Among humans, men who share an especially strong bond with their mothers are often derided as “mama’s boys.”

But killer whales call this cultural trope into question, showing that mother-son ties can be a survival strategy effective enough to have potentially shaped the evolution of menopause itself. Nielsen gave birth to her own son shortly after finishing her Ph.D. on Bigg’s orcas, and she recalls that when he was about 10 months old she began to notice a connection between his curiosity and eagerness to explore the world and the playful behavior of young killer whales she was analyzing for her research. “I saw the killer whale in him,” she says. 

Do orcas get hot flashes? 

I have wondered, while swimming laps at the pool and feeling the sudden, stomach-dropping sensation of dread that I’ve learned heralds the onset of one for me.

About the physiology of orca menopause we know almost nothing. Analysis of hormones in the feces of killer whales can show whether a female is currently in estrus, but not whether she has definitively stopped ovulating, Giles says. She suspects that, much like in humans, killer whale females begin to ovulate some years before they are able to carry a pregnancy to term, and continue ovulating, perhaps irregularly, for a while after they are no longer able to do so.

But as for what it feels like to be a killer whale in perimenopause? “I have no idea,” she says.

Maybe this lacuna is part of what makes it so tempting to project our own desires and fantasies about the menopausal transition onto them.

We also don’t know for sure how the evolution of killer whale menopause relates to the human version. Does our current experience of menopause reflect a more multigenerational, perhaps matrilineal social structure that existed in the human past? 

Until recently, humans were thought to be the only land animals to go through menopause, but now post-reproductive lifespans (albeit shorter than those of humans and killer whales) have been documented among certain semi-captive Asian elephants and in a population of chimpanzees that is relatively sheltered from predators and poaching.

Is menopause more common than we have thought? Or do unusual circumstances occasionally allow female mammals to outlive their egg supply? 

Are we humans, for that matter, somehow living a semi-captive lifestyle? To what degree does mutual care and support enable us to live longer than we might “in the wild”?

The answers to some of these questions may remain lost to deep time. What the southern residents can reveal to us about menopause in the future is also uncertain. The population is critically endangered, with just seventy-some individuals remaining, and threats including noisy ship traffic, persistent toxic pollutants, and lack of salmon imperil their continued survival. 

Perhaps 40% of the population was lost as a result of captures for theme parks in the 1960s and 1970s, and the demographic legacy of that disruption continues to this day. Many of the young females who were taken away or died during roundups would now, had they lived and remained in the wild, be in their early post-reproductive years: a whole generation of matriarchs lost to the spectacle of human entertainment.

Meanwhile, over the last few decades, a number of southern resident females in their 40s and 50s have died, consistent with a worldwide pattern of loss of the oldest, wisest animals and raising the question of whether the southern residents will have truly venerable matriarchs to guide them into the future.

The oldest southern resident orca, and the world’s oldest known killer whale, is L25, who may be approaching 100 years of age. In the 1970s, conservationists began assigning nicknames to the orcas of the Pacific Northwest in a bid to create emotional connections that would bring an end to the captures, and L25 is also known as Ocean Sun.

I don’t know how Ocean Sun got that nickname, but it makes me think of late afternoon on a summer day.

I picture golden flecks of light on the surface of moving water, and I think of the common heritage shared by humans and orcas, our convergence across 90 million years of evolutionary separation – the raw material of biological constraint hammered into the gold leaf of culture and care.