ZME SCIENCE - Whether you’re a human or a mouse, staying physically active is good for you. But one of the central ideas in evolutionary biology is that everything comes with trade-offs. If you dedicate too much energy to becoming stronger or faster, that’s energy that can’t be spent on repairing the body or living longer.
But what if this idea is wrong, or at the very least incomplete?
For more than three decades, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have bred mice that run extraordinary distances. The “High Runner” mice can cover roughly three times as much ground on exercise wheels as ordinary control mice. Researchers expected that athletic extreme to carry a hidden cost: fewer offspring, shorter lives, or both. But when they finally followed 100 breeding pairs across their lifetimes, the expected penalty never clearly appeared.