Hi Evan,

I am going to move to a different controversial species, elephants....

If you look at the average age of death in elephants in captivity over the last 100 years you get a age that is well below the average in the wild. Part of this is due to the fact that these records go back for more than a century in the USA and cover an extensive period of time before we began to get a good handle on thier dietary and other husbandry needs. Now if you take the median ages of elephants in captivity today you get a very different demographic picture.. (but then if you figure out the average age of death in people in the USA over the last 100 years, it would be significantly lower than it is today). If you start looking at average ages of death in captivity say since the 1970s you get a life span that is easily comparable to the reported longevities to elephants in the wild. (does this mean that this is where we stop trying to improve thier care, no.).

With respect to trees, there are average lifespans for trees after which they decline and eventually die...

Ed

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