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Asked by shamail575 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 20 Jun 2013.
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Suzanne Harvey answered on 20 Jun 2013:
It is definitely possible to tell the age of an animal from its skeleton, but I don’t know if there are general methods for living animals. Fish scales have rings like tree trunks, so you can age a fish by counting the rings in its scales!
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Joanna Bryson answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Scientists estimate the age of different animals in different ways. “Estimate” means an informed guess, it’s not perfectly knowing. How you estimate depends on the kind of animal and how they grow. So for example, some insects are only adults for a few days, so it’s not hard to guess how old they are! And you guess how old a lot of animals are by looking at their teeth — depending on what they usuall eat, an animal’s teeth will wear down at some rate on average.
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Renata Medeiros answered on 20 Jun 2013:
This is an interesting question and an important one for animal behaviour. The methods Suzanne described are useful for dead animals but there are ways of knowing the age of living animals as well.
I’m not sure about insects in particular though, I suspect they are tricky ones because most insect species don’t live more than one year and some species only last a few hours (though a few species of ants and beetles can live up to 50 years)! So, how do we know this? Mostly by putting tags on the animals and checking them from time to time to see if they’re still alive! We do this with all sorts of animals and sometimes we tag them when they have just been born so we will know their exact age at any time. Some animals are almost impossible to age without tags but others are not so hard. For instance, you can guess the age of a dog by its teeth or the age of hamsters by how much hair they have on the inside of their ears. It is the same with wild animals, for some of them there will be some clues but you need to learn them well.
With birds we can usually tell their age (roughly) based on which feathers look old and which ones look new but some birds make it easier: you can tell how old a puffin is by looking at the number of grooves (kind of rings) on the beak – each groove counts two years.
It is also possible to know some animals age from parts of their DNA called telomeres, but this is rather complicated and expensive.
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