By tracking nearly every movement of a tiny fish’s life from adolescence to death, a new Science study reveals a hidden behavioral blueprint of aging—one that can predict a fish’s age or how long an individual will live.
Mapping behavior of individual vertebrate animals across lifespan could provide an unprecedented view into the lifelong process of aging. We created a platform for high-resolution continuous behavioral tracking of the African killifish across natural lifespan from adolescence to death. We found that animals follow distinct individual aging trajectories. The behaviors of long-lived animals differed markedly from those of short-lived animals, even relatively early in life, and were linked to organ-specific transcriptomic shifts. Machine-learning models accurately inferred age and even forecasted an individual’s future lifespan, given only behavior at a young age. Finally, we found that animals progressed through adulthood in a sequence of stable and stereotyped behavioral stages with abrupt transitions, revealing precise structure for an architecture of aging.
