Overview
- A University of Bristol–led team published the paper on June 16 in Nature Communications after analysing decades of data from butterfly houses, mark‑release‑recapture field studies and controlled insectary experiments.
- Lifespan varied widely across the Heliconiini tribe with recorded extremes such as Heliconius hewitsoni living up to 348 days and the related Dione juno living about 14 days, a roughly 25‑fold difference.
- Functional tests showed at least one Heliconius species, H. hecale, showed little or no decline in grip strength with age, indicating slowed physiological ageing compared with short‑lived relatives.
- Experiments linked adult pollen feeding to better body mass and muscle performance but found that removing pollen did not erase the Heliconius longevity advantage, implying evolved, heritable physiological differences beyond diet.
- Authors say Heliconius offer a tractable comparative system for probing the molecular and enzymatic bases of extended healthspan, though the exact mechanisms remain unknown and any relevance to humans is speculative.