When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017, it took 3,000 lives and cut off basic services on some parts of the island for nearly a year. The devastation was not restricted to that island, however. Maria’s 155-mile-per-hour winds also ripped into a 38-acre islet called Cayo Santiago that lies a half mile off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico.
Once the immediate crisis had passed, however, the scientists realized the disaster had opened a door. “We had a golden opportunity to study the impact of a major natural disaster of the sort that is becoming ever more common with climate change,” Platt says. These researchers had access to a rare resource: blood samples from the island’s monkeys taken before disaster struck. The animals have blood drawn each year as part of a long-term study of how their genes interact with their social environment. So the team was able to compare blood from 435 rhesus macaques drawn before the hurricane with blood taken from 108 animals one year afterward.
The storm seemed to etch its greatest effects on so-called heat-shock proteins, a class of proteins produced in response to stress that assist in the proper folding of other proteins. Blood samples taken from monkeys after the hurricane showed decreased expression of genes for these proteins, a pattern that also occurs with aging.
The molecular results are suggestive but not definitive, says epidemiologist Daniel Belsky of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. “There is no gold-standard measure of biological aging,” he says. But taken together, Belsky adds, the data indicate an aging of the animals in response to the hurricane.
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Makes sense, stress causes againg in humans as well, aging physical changes, stressors also cause skin to age. Sadly these little primates endured a horrific environmental episode. Me. it is every fk day.
NoNatDisasters 👍🙏🙏🙏
If we recognize that stress impacts animals as it does in humans than maybe we should think twice about exploitation and habitat destruction. Can you imagine the horrors if we were treated the way we treat animals?