Turtles live forever? This is the intro to an article in Discover I just read about how turtles live a long time (pretty good read-though I'm a little skeptical that turtles are as bright as the researchers claim). The most shocking thing for me (and apparently the researchers) was that older turtle females are more fertile than the younger ones. Here's the PubMed link to the abstract of an article published in Experimental Gerontology on this issue. The reasons for this peculiarity might surprise you (hint: mice are much more likely to get eaten in a few years-so they better have offspring). The funniest thing about this stuff is that many grad students didn't get into this stuff because slow-reproducing animals are not the best test cases for life-history studies if you want to get your doctorate in less than 10 years. Oh, and here's a back off the envelope calculation I did out of curiosity-black women spend about 11% of their life in childhood, while white women spend 12% of their life in childhood. Now, puberty onset has been dropping in recent years, but I wonder if the total proportion of time spent in any given stage of life will be constant (black women have a life expectancy of 74 vs. 80 for white women, so the 8 vs. 9.7 puberty difference doesn't seem as big in that light).